Weird http404 errors

  • Every week I’m getting several decades of FILE NOT FOUND errors in my server log. They’re in the form:
    https://www.blog.com/foo/bar/test

    Somehow, there’s a /test appended at the end of URLs, and the referer is empty.
    Is it some sort of malicious attack, trying to exploit some old WP plugin? How can I block it, even if it appear to be unharmful?
    Thanks

    P.S
    .htaccess and permalinks are OK, and it doesn’t happen when a “normal” user visits the blog.

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)

  • Just curious, are all these entries in the logs from the same IP address?

    Thread Starter flapane

    (@flapane)

    That’s a good call, I never tried to check the IPs, I only took a look at the error log in Awstats, which doesn’t show IP addresses.

    Now I checked the access log and… it looks like they’re generated by genuine bingbot IPs:
    207.46.13.102 – – [29/Jan/2015:11:35:37 +0100] “GET /blog/foo/title-of-the-post/test HTTP/1.1” 404 11824 “-” “Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; bingbot/2.0; +https://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm)”

    That’s curious.

    That is strange, and you’re right, that IP is registered to Microsoft.

    Does your sitemap have /test on the end of the URLs?

    Thread Starter flapane

    (@flapane)

    Negative, I’ve just checked all the URLs (the map is automatically generated by XML Sitemap Generator).

    It’s Bing crawling through your site. I’m not sure how they work and why it would go after a test URL, but I wouldn’t be too worried about it.

    Thread Starter flapane

    (@flapane)

    Yep, at this point I can’t do much.

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)
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