Interesting User-Agent

Posted: Sat Feb 13, 2010 9:44 am

This showed up this morning when checking user-agents:

Code:




<?php phpinfo(); ?>

What's up with that, a user with that UA was checking a particular post in the forum. Anything to be concerned with?

Cheers

Site Admin/Owner Joined: Aug 27, 2002 Posts: 17088

dad7732 wrote:

This showed up this morning when checking user-agents:

Code:




<?php phpinfo(); ?>

What's up with that, a user with that UA was checking a particular post in the forum. Anything to be concerned with?

Cheers

Someone is trying to inject that PHP code to see if they can get the phpinfo() information. And they can from many sites!

Search Google for phpinfo HTTP_USER_AGENT. Then click on any that say phpinfo(). Shocked

Posted: Sat Feb 13, 2010 10:48 am

Can that be injected in a RN site? And can it be blocked as such in the harvester menu?

Thanks

Posted: Sat Feb 13, 2010 12:25 pm

ooohhhh, that's bad. Shocked
having your phpinfo page indexed by Google??
lol, one even had ads setup on the page ROTFL

Posted: Sat Feb 13, 2010 12:37 pm

That was the only string in the UA, nothing else, that's what interested me as I've never seen a UA like that before.

Posted: Fri Feb 19, 2010 5:56 pm

dad7732 wrote:

Can that be injected in a RN site?

Doubtful. The only thing looking at the user agent string is NukeSentinel and its "tight".

Quote:

And can it be blocked as such in the harvester menu?

I would think so. You could test it out using a browser plug-in which allows modification of the headers.

Posted: Fri Feb 19, 2010 7:48 pm

I have several ua switcher extensions for Firefox, may give it a whirl, thanks

Worker Joined: Aug 26, 2007 Posts: 236

In Sentinel click on:
Tracked IP Menu
Display Tracked User Agents
Here you can block individual user agents.

Posted: Sat Feb 20, 2010 8:05 am

Yes, I know, that's an alternative and curious if that particular string could actually be blocked. But I was wondering if there were any consequences to blocking that string. Testing so far proves harmless.

Posted: Sat Feb 20, 2010 11:34 am

Should be no consequences of blocking it via the Harvestor blocker (as it ONLY looks at the User Agent header). I also think it would hurt to block it via the string blocker unless you think you'll use that string somewhere in a news article, content, post, etc.

Posted: Sat Feb 20, 2010 12:05 pm

I've only seen this once in many years using Sentinel, so really no cause to be overly concerned. Thanks for the heads up, it just caught me off-guard a bit.

Cheers