Psycheclone

[some guy from mars]

I checked my access logs from yesterday and an "entity" called psycheclone visitied nearly every page at my site. What is "psycheclone" and what is its purpose? Good or evil? At first I thought it might be a searchbot but could be mistaken.

If this is something I do not want around how do I prevent it from entering my site? Has this happened to anyone else?

[areidmtm]

Yeah I'd block all of those stupid bots. I sure do.

Add this to your .htaccess file

SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "psycheclone" bad_bot
Deny from env=bad_bot

Also some others you may want to block as well

SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "SurveyBot/2.3" bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "ia_archiver" bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "SBIder/0.8-dev" bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "Mozilla/1.0" bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "Mozilla/2.0" bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "Mozilla/3.0" bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "aipbot/1.0" bad_bot
Deny from env=bad_bot

Also take a look at http://www.bluehostforums.com/showthread.php?t=647
This was an older way of doing the bot blocking, but I changed the format a bit. On that thread there are alot more bot you can block

[some guy from mars]

Add this to your .htaccess file Code: SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "psycheclone" bad_bot Deny from env=bad_bot

This is excellent advise but the problem is that I am a novice and do not know where my .htaccess file is and how to add the code to it. Hope I do not come across as dense but I am still in a steep upward learning curve process.

The reason I am asking is that the psycheclone bot returned this afternoon and again visited most of my pages- and used up a ton of bandwidth in the process. I was hoping the thing would just go away...

Thanks for your help,
Andy

[grant]

This is excellent advise but the problem is that I am a novice and do not know where my .htaccess file is and how to add the code to it. Hope I do not come across as dense but I am still in a steep upward learning curve process.

Your .htaccess file resides in your public_html (or root) folder. I don't exactly recall but I think I had to make mine, then again it could have been there and I just added to it. My memory is fuzzy on that.

The reason I am asking is that the psycheclone bot returned this afternoon and again visited most of my pages- and used up a ton of bandwidth in the process. I was hoping the thing would just go away...

Thanks for your help,
Andy

It's not going to go away, once bots hit your site they tend to keep coming back unitl you block them. Either add that bit of code to your .htacces file or block the IP in your IP deny manager in Cpanel. Either way you need to stop this bot. According to dvessel (read more here) it's a mail spam bot.

[gbob]

From the cPanel use the File Manager link to go to (not surprisingly) the online File Manager for your account. Go into the public_html directory and create the .htaccess file then edit the file and drop in the text listed. Save and all is done.
If you have subdomain or other domains then also create a .htaccess in each "root" directory for the domain.

[nick106b]

Some sound advice there..
I'll be doing the same job on my site - TONIGHT!!!
Thanks people.
Nick.