Bots visiting.

You may see some very old browsers or misconfigured UserAgents for browsers in your logs. These odd user agents are seen visiting from IP addresses and ASNs linked to Hosting companies.

You can expect these to be some bot, a computer script that visited websites for whatever reason the person that has decided to do that for. These bots that try to hide genuine human visitors provide no benefit but do take up resources that could be used to show pages to genuine visitors.

User-Agent Header

The User-Agent header can be set to almost anything you like; it can even be 'blank' and not contain any information. The User-Agent is helpful but not to be relied upon for genuine information. The helpfulness comes with the information that describes the type of rendering engine and capabilities the browser has. This means the website could tailor the page to match the capabilities of the browser. Less useful now because the web has moved forward, but back in the early days of the World Wide Web, the UA - User-Agent header in the browser was a helpful hint. There are extensions for Chrome and Firefox that make altering the User-Agent a simple task.

Why?

Why use an old, misconfigured or incorrect User agent to identify a bot? The only reason for a computer program to be configured to masquerade as a genuine human is to hide in plain sight. To slip through security filters to trick web admins into thinking these user agents are linked to real human visitors. Why do they make spelling or configuration mistakes? I don't know, but it could be just laziness or a way to leave their mark.

Good bots

Good bots can be helpful, like the well-known Google Bots that crawl pages to index content for their search engine. The Google bots clearly identify themselves, so it is easy to block them and count the visits. This is a good example of a good bot, and no deception is employed in the visits.

Lists

Here are a few of those User Agents seen in the wild that look like human visitors with old or unusual browsers but come from Hosting addresses linked to spam, scraping and probing.

• Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_10_1) AppleWebKit/600.1.25 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/8.0 Safari/600.1.25
• Mozilla/6.4 (Windows NT 11.1) Gecko/2010102 Firefox/99.0
• Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:71.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/71.0
• Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/91.0.4472.164 Safari/537.36 (2b7146e2-bc0c-4240-ae78-608c0c43c275)
• Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.2; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/53.0.2785.104 Safari/537.36 Core/1.53.3103.400 QQBrowser/9.6.11372.400
• Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/112.0.0.0 Safari/537.36
• Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/116.0.0.0 Safari/537.36
• Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_12_6) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Edge/76.0.1655.82 Safari/537.36
• Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/70.0.3538.102 Safari/537.36 Edge/18.19577
• Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/48.0.2564.109 Safari/537.36
• Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/99.0.4844.82 Safari/537.36
• Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/57.0.772.39 Safari/537.36
• Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/67.0.2925.105 Safari/537.36
• Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/58.0.3029.110 Safari/537.36 OPR/45.0.2552.898
• Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/38.0.2125.122 Safari/537.36 SE 2.X MetaSr 1.0
• Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/41.0.2228.0 Safari/537.36
• Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/103.0.0.0 Safari/537.36
• Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.22 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/25.0.1364.5 Safari/537.22
• Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/34.0.1847.76 Safari/537.36
• Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_8_4) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/49.0.2656.18 Safari/537.36
• Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_13_4; rv:82.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/82.0
• Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_14_4) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/83.0.4103.116 Safari/537.36
• Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_5; rv:76.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/76.0
• Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/103.0.0.0 Safari/537.36
• Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/119.0.0.0 Safari/537.36
• Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/114.0.0.0 Safari/537.36
• Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 11_2_1) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/79.0.3945.74 Safari/537.36 Edg/79.0.309.43
• Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64; rv:87.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/87.0
• Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.2; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/103.0.0.0 Safari/537.36
• Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/71.0.3578.98 Safari/537.36
• Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/80.0.3987.149 Safari/537.36
• Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/89.0.4389.114 Safari/537.36
• Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/112.0.0.0 YaBrowser/23.5.3.904 Yowser/2.5 Safari/537.36
• Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/103.0.5060.114 Safari/537.36
• Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:80.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/80.0
• Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:72.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/72.0
• Opera/9.80 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_13_6; U; en) Presto/2.2.15 Version/10.10