Large Amount of 403 Forbidden Daily

Hi @wakeupworld

I hope you are doing well.

403 is a forbidden status, if you are running the Scan all and those links are from the same source the source may be blocking due to the number of accesses but when you do a single request it won’t block as it is just one request.

But to share more accurate information is it possible to share any link example so we can make a cURL request and see the output?

For the Cloud it seem so, we have a timeout limit if the site is too big it will reach that timeout but if you can share your site URL we can check the Cloud scan logs to see if it is the case.

Best Regards
Patrick Freitas

Thanks so much for getting back to me, I appreciate it. I have found a lot of these links are to scientific journal papers. But definitely not limited to. Most links are confirmed with a manual recheck, but some arent even though when I click on the link the page loads fine.

Here are some examples,

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ptr.976/abstract – I just noticed that this link redirects to https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/ptr.976 Doese this redirect have something to do with the issue?

Anything from the below domain, will show as forbidden and pressing a manual recheck will not change it, but if you click on the link it is not broken.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/26713983_The_Relationship_Between_General_Population_Suicide_Rates_and_Mental_Health_Funding_Service_Provision_and_National_Policy_a_Cross-National_Study

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0163782715300333

https://www.goldjournal.net/article/S0090-4295(13)01536-7/abstract

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpsy/article/PIIS2215-0366%2816%2930065-7/abstract

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0706743716689055

Thanks again for your help with this, let me know if you need any more examples.

Hi @wakeupworld

Thank you for response and providing examples.

I checked them and they seem to be legitimate 403 responses from target servers. They are all behind CloudFlare and it’s a common issue. Unfortunately, we can’t really do much about it. CloudFlare (though some big services also do that on their own) analyzes traffic/requests and uses quite advanced methods of determining whether those request may possibly be bots or automated traffic.

It usually detects such link checks as automated traffic and blocks it – so even though you can visit given URL in browser, checker will return such error.

In this case, recommended way to deal with that is manually visit such links to confirm if they are working and if they are – marked them to be ignored so future scans wouldn’t bring them back to the broken list links.

Kind regards,
Adam

Hi @wakeupworld,

Since we haven’t heard from you for a while. I’ll mark this thread as resolved for now. Please feel free to re-open this thread if you need any further assistance.

Kind Regards
Nithin