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Protect Your Site with a Blackhole for Bad Bots

[ Black Hole (Vector) ] One of my favorite security measures here at Perishable Press is the site’s virtual Blackhole trap for bad bots. The concept is simple: include a hidden link to a robots.txt-forbidden directory somewhere on your pages. Bots that ignore or disobey your robots rules will crawl the link and fall into the honeypot trap, which then performs a WHOIS Lookup and records the event in the blackhole data file. Once added to the blacklist data file, bad bots immediately are denied access to your site.

Contents

Tip: For a shorter version of this tutorial, check out the Quick Start Guide »
WordPress user? Check out the free Blackhole plugin and Blackhole Pro »
Important: The article below is for the standalone PHP version of Blackhole for Bad Bots. For information about the Blackhole WordPress plugins, visit WordPress.org (free version) and/or Plugin Planet (pro version).

Intro

[ Black Hole (Graphic) ] I call it the “one-strike” rule: bots have one chance to follow the robots.txt protocol, check the site’s robots.txt file, and obey its directives. Failure to comply results in immediate banishment. The best part is that the Blackhole only affects bad bots: normal users never see the hidden link, and good bots obey the robots rules in the first place. So the percentage of false positives is extremely low to non-existent. It’s an ideal way to protect your site against bad bots silently, efficiently, and effectively.

With a few easy steps, you can set up your own Blackhole to trap bad bots and protect your site from evil scripts, bandwidth thieves, content scrapers, spammers, and other malicious behavior.

[ Blackhole for Bad Bots ] The Blackhole is built with PHP, and uses a bit of .htaccess to protect the blackhole directory. Refined over the years and completely revamped for this tutorial, the Blackhole consists of a plug-&-play /blackhole/ directory that contains the following three files:

  • .htaccess – protects the log file
  • blackhole.dat – log file
  • index.php – blackhole script

These three files work together to create the Blackhole for Bad Bots. If you are running WordPress, the Blackhole plugin is recommended instead of this standalone PHP version.

Note: By default, .htaccess files are hidden on Windows and OS X, so to view them you need to enable “Show hidden files” on your machine, or use any FTP or code-editing app that is capable of displaying them. It’s a common feature.

Overview

The Blackhole is developed to make implementation as easy as possible. Here is an overview of the steps:

  1. Upload the /blackhole/ directory to your site
  2. Edit the four variables in the “EDIT HERE” section in index.php.
  3. Ensure writable server permissions for the blackhole.dat file
  4. Add a single line to the top of your pages to include the index.php file
  5. Add a hidden link to the /blackhole/ directory in the footer
  6. Forbid crawling of /blackhole/ by adding a line to your robots.txt

So installation is straightforward, but there are many ways to customize functionality. For complete instructions, jump ahead to the installation steps. For now, I think a good way to understand how it works is to check out a demo..

Live Demo

I have set up a working demo of the Blackhole for this tutorial. It works exactly like the download version, but it’s set up as a sandbox, so when you trigger the trap, it blocks you only from the demo itself. Here’s how it works:

  1. First visit to the Blackhole demo loads the trap page, runs the whois lookup, and adds your IP address to the blacklist data file
  2. Once your IP is added to the blacklist, all future requests for the Blackhole demo will be denied access

So you get one chance (per IP address) to see how it works. Once you visit the demo, your IP address will be blocked from the demo only — you will still have full access to this tutorial (and everything else at Perishable Press). So with that in mind, here is the demo link (opens new tab):

Visit once to see the Blackhole trap, and then again to observe that you’ve been blocked. Again, even if you are blocked from the demo page, you will continue to have access to everything else here at Perishable Press.

Tip: You can visit the Blackhole Demo via any free proxy service if you want to try again and do another test.

How to Install

[ Black Hole (Physical) ] Here are complete instructions for implementing the PHP/standalone of Blackhole for Bad Bots. Note that these steps are written for Apache servers running PHP. The steps are the same for other PHP-enabled servers (e.g., Nginx, IIS), but you will need to replace the .htaccess file and rules with whatever works for particular server environment. Note: for a concise summary of these steps, check out this tutorial.

Step 1: Download the Blackhole zip file, unzip and upload to your site’s root directory. This location is not required, but it enables everything to work out of the box. To use a different location, edit the include path in Step 4.

Step 2: Edit the four variables in the “EDIT HERE” section in index.php.

Step 3: Change file permissions for blackhole.dat to make it writable by the server. The permission settings may vary depending on server configuration. If you are unsure about this, ask your host. Note that the blackhole script needs to be able to read, write, and execute the blackhole.dat file.

Step 4: Include the Blackhole script by adding the following line to the top of your pages (e.g., header.php):

<?php include(realpath(getenv('DOCUMENT_ROOT')) . '/blackhole/index.php'); ?>

The Blackhole script checks the bot’s IP address against the blacklist data file. If a match is found, the request is blocked with a customizable message. View the source code for more information.

Step 5: Add a hidden link to the /blackhole/ directory in the footer of your site’s web pages (replace “Your Site Name” with the name of your site):

<a rel="nofollow" style="display:none" href="https://example.com/blackhole/" title="Do NOT follow this link or you will be banned from the site!">Your Site Name</a>

This is the hidden trigger link that bad bots will follow. It’s currently hidden with CSS, so 99.999% of visitors won’t ever see it. Alternately, to hide the link from users without relying on CSS, replace the anchor text with a transparent 1-pixel GIF image. For example:

<a rel="nofollow" style="display:none" href="http://example.com/blackhole/" title="Do NOT follow this link or you will be banned from the site!"><img src="/images/1px.gif" alt=""></a>

Remember to edit the link href value and the image src to match the correct locations on your server.

Step 6: Finally, add a Disallow directive to your site’s robots.txt file:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /blackhole/

This step is pretty important. Without the proper robots directives, all bots would fall into the Blackhole because they wouldn’t know any better. If a bot wants to crawl your site, it must obey the rules! The robots rule that we are using basically says, “All bots DO NOT visit the /blackhole/ directory or anything inside of it.” So it is important to get your robots rules correct.

Step 7: Done! Remember to test thoroughly before going live. Also check out the section on customizing for more ideas.

Testing

[ Black Hole (Figurative) ] You can verify that the script is working by visiting the hidden trigger link (added in step 5). That should take you to the Blackhole warning page for your first visit, and then block you from further access on subsequent visits. To verify that you’ve been blocked entirely, try visiting any other page on your site. To restore site access at any time, you can clear the contents of the blackhole.dat log file.

Important: Make sure that all of the rules in your robots.txt file are correct and have proper syntax. For example, you can use the free robots.txt validator in Google Webmaster Tools (requires Google account).

Tip: Make sure to check the list of whitelisted user agents. For example, the Chrome browser is whitelisted. So if you want to test that Blackhole is working, either use a non-Chrome browser or remove chrome from the whitelist.
Tip: To reset the list of blocked bots at any time, simply clear the contents of the blackhole.dat file.

Customize

The previous steps will get the Blackhole set up with default configuration, but there are some details that you may want to customize:

  • index.php (lines 25–28): Edit the four variables as needed
  • index.php (lines 140–164): Customize markup of the warning page
  • index.php (line 180): Customize the list of whitelisted bots

These are the recommended changes, but the PHP is clean and generates valid HTML, so feel free to modify the markup or anything else as needed.

Troubleshoot

If you get an error letting you know that a file cannot be found, it could be an issue with how the script specifies the absolute path, using getenv('DOCUMENT_ROOT'). That function works on a majority of servers, but if it fails on your server for whatever reason, you can simply replace it with the actual path. From Step 4, the include script looks like this:

<?php include(realpath(getenv('DOCUMENT_ROOT')) . '/blackhole/index.php'); ?>

So if you are getting not-found or similar errors, try this instead:

/var/www/httpdocs/blackhole/index.php

So that would be the actual absolute path to the blackhole index.php file on your server. As long as you get the path correct, it’s gonna fix any “file can’t be found” type errors you may be experiencing.

If in doubt about the actual full absolute path, consult your web host or use a PHP function or constant such as __DIR__ to obtain the correct infos. And check out my tutorial over at WP-Mix for more information about including files with PHP and WordPress.

Tip: I wrote an in-depth guide on how to verify that Blackhole is working. It is written for users of the WordPress plugin, but the general steps show how to test the PHP/standalone version as well. Long story short: use a proxy service.

Caveat Emptor

Blocking bots is serious business. Good bots obey robots.txt rules, but there may be potentially useful bots that do not. Yahoo is the perfect example: it’s a valid search engine that sends some traffic, but sadly the Yahoo Slurp bot is too stupid to follow the rules. Since setting up the Blackhole several years ago, I’ve seen Slurp disobey robots rules hundreds of times.

By default, the Blackhole DOES NOT BLOCK any of the big search engines. So Google, Bing, and company always will be allowed access to your site, even if they disobey your robots.txt rules. See the next section for more details.

Whitelist Good Bots

In order to ensure that all of the major search engines always have access to your site, Blackhole whitelists the following bots:

  • AOL.com
  • Baidu
  • Bing/MSN
  • DuckDuckGo
  • Google
  • Teoma
  • Yahoo!
  • Yandex

Additionally, popular social media services are whitelisted, as well as some other known “good” bots. To whitelist these bots, the Blackhole script uses regular expressions to ensure that all possible name variations are allowed access. For each request made to your site, Blackhole checks the User Agent and always allows anything that contains any of the following strings:

a6-indexer, adsbot-google, ahrefsbot, aolbuild, apis-google, baidu, bingbot, bingpreview, butterfly, chrome, cloudflare, duckduckgo, embedly, facebookexternalhit, facebot, googlebot, google page speed, ia_archiver, linkedinbot, mediapartners-google, msnbot, netcraftsurvey, outbrain, pinterest, quora, rogerbot, showyoubot, slackbot, slurp, sogou, teoma, tweetmemebot, twitterbot, uptimerobot, urlresolver, vkshare, w3c_validator, wordpress, wp rocket, yandex

So any bot that reports a user agent that contains any of these strings will NOT be blocked and always will have full access to your site. To customize the list of whitelisted bots, open index.php and locate the function blackhole_whitelist(), where you will find the list of allowed bots.

The upside of whitelisting these user agents ensures that anything claiming to be a major search engine is allowed open access. The downside is that user-agent strings are easily spoofed, so a bad bot could crawl along and say, “Hey look, I’m teh Googlebot!” and the whitelist would grant access. It is your decision where to draw the line.

With PHP, it is possible to verify the true identity of each bot, but doing so consumes significant resources and could overload the server. Avoiding that scenario, the Blackhole errs on the side of caution: it’s better to allow a few spoofs than to block any of the major search engines and other major web services.

Tip: Check out CLI Forward-Reverse Lookup for how to verify bot identity.

License & Disclaimer

Terms of Use: Blackhole for Bad Bots is released under GNU General Public License. By downloading the Blackhole, you agree to accept full responsibility for its use. In no way shall the author be held accountable for anything that happens after the file has been downloaded.

Questions & Feedback

Questions? Comments? Send ’em via my contact form. Thanks!

Download

Here you can download the latest version of Blackhole for Bad Bots. By downloading, you agree to the terms.

Standalone PHP version, last updated: 2023/04/04
Download Blackhole for Bad BotsVersion 4.6 ( 4.43 KB ZIP )

About the Author
Jeff Starr = Fullstack Developer. Book Author. Teacher. Human Being.
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236 responses to “Protect Your Site with a Blackhole for Bad Bots”

  1. So, seems to work, but seeing a couple errors in my apache logs.

    [Thu Jul 22 13:23:01 2010] [error] [client 119.63.198.97] PHP Notice: Undefined variable: buffer in /var/www/htdocs/blackhole/index.php on line 78
    [Thu Jul 22 13:23:01 2010] [error] [client 119.63.198.97] PHP Notice: Undefined variable: extra in /var/www/htdocs/blackhole/index.php on line 98

    Also seeing occasionally:

    [Thu Jul 22 13:56:21 2010] [error] [client 64.40.121.187] PHP Notice: Undefined variable: nextServer in /var/www/htdocs/blackhole/index.php on line 91

    The first one looks like it’s just because you’re trying to append to a variable that isn’t defined in the first place…

    The second… is just because extra isn’t being defined all the time.

    The last one… just needs to be something more like if(isset($nextServer)) { because if returns an error on unset variables. if($variable) is not kosher for a while now.

  2. Getting a weird return from the arin WOIS lookup.

    Query terms are ambiguous. The query is assumed to be:
    “n XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX”

    Use “?” to get help.

    The following results may also be obtained via:
    http://whois.arin.net/rest/nets;q=XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX?showDetails=true&showARIN=false

    I’ve been through it several times now, and tried several fixes but Arin continues to find an ‘n’ character (presumably from a ‘n’) on the front of the IP. Can’t pinpoint where its getting that, or how to fix it.

  3. Jeff Starr 2010/08/03 9:45 pm Reply

    Frank, I’m also trying to resolve that issue, but so far without success. I’m not sure if there is anything that can be done from within the script.

    If anyone has further info on this it would be appreciated! :)

  4. ARIN Changed its protocol for directory lookups which is why you’re seeing that weird message. They recommend changing to their new RESTful protocol.

    You can read more about it here:
    https://www.arin.net/resources/whoisrws/index.html

    In my WP plugin version of this script (in process) I’m looking into switching to the RESTful query protocol they recommend and styling the returned XML.

  5. @RS: The two PHP Notices you’re getting are an easy fix. Make a new line after global $msg, $target; and add the following 2 lines:

    $buffer = '';
    $nextServer = false;

    @ Jeff and darrinb: Thanks for the backup. Based on my tests I was pretty certain the problem existed outside the Blackhole code.

  6. Anonymous 2010/08/06 1:42 amReply

    Okay this might sound stupid to most of you, but why should I ban bad-bots? Obviously they access content I don’t want them to access, but banning them from the site would have pretty bad consequences (google).

    I know nothing about this topic, but wouldn’t it be a good idea to blacklist the bots who went into the trap, not from the domain, instead update the .htaccess file to block them only from the pages I don’t want those bots to crawl?

    Well I really don’t know a thing about .htaccess or blocking bots, so this might be a rather silly idea.

  7. One reason: bandwidth.

  8. Jeff Starr 2010/08/07 6:54 pm Reply

    Anonymous:

    Great questions.

    In addition to bandwidth, blocking bad bots helps conserve server resources, which are a commodity on non-shared environments. Also, many bad bots are malicious, so blocking them also improves the security of your site, which benefits everyone.

    Custom blocking via htaccess is also a good idea. There are many (many) articles here at Perishable Press on the topic of using htaccess to protect your site (including blocking bad bots).

  9. You are writing that this script should be on top of the pages

    So if I put this script on my header.php that will be correct?
    Or do I need to put it on “single.php, page.php, archive.php etc etc”?

    Just a little confused here…

    Thanks
    Soren

  10. Jeff Starr 2010/08/09 9:24 am Reply

    @Soren: Yeah, the include snippet just needs to be placed at the top of your header.php file. Then, because that file is included with each page view, the Blackhole script covers your entire site.

  11. Rune Jensen 2010/08/16 2:22 pmReply

    I have succes putting a small form in a HTML remark with the action attribute to the honeypot. Fields are named with attactive words like email, post, blog and message. Since Google are actually running HTML, they will not see the HTML remark and not follow it.

    Another is to use an if statement to check if a request accepts GZIP in accept-encoding. Since bots do almost never have access to the compression library, they will not accept GZIP. Then put in the form if GZIP is not accepted, and use af post method. Google and other search engines do never follow post, since if they did, they would themselves be spambots.

    I use a mix of these two methods, works great, and takes almost all spambots as well as harvesters. My blacklist is constantly around 30-50 malicous bots. When blocking, use 404 or (eventually) 410 status errors, do not indicate you have accepted the request.

    The blacklist, the honeypot creates, mine is dynamic, since I do not want an IP banned for life and the blacklist to be too long. Generelly, unban an IP if it has not made a request for some time and keep the list on a max of around 70 IPs, My experiense is this is enough even for large attacks.

  12. Rune Jensen 2010/08/16 4:35 pmReply

    Some additional tips, that might or might not be usefull – these are more advanced, and focused on blog spambots more than the blackhole, but quite effective wellknown techniques:

    You might want to use HTTP header information to make a “fingerprint” (fx. an MD5 checksum) of the request. The reason is, a lot of spambots are only posting to, not getting the page. They will get their information about your page instead from harvester bots, which are scraping your site. And a lot of times, the header are not the same between bots.

    I use useragent, accept-encoding, accept-language, accept-charset, connection and protocol for value. To make it page-dependent as well, I put in the URL.

    Use of a stardate (look it up on Google) is effective to simulate a session without using cookies, so that you have to post within (say for example) 4 hours of getting a page. Combine it with the fingerprint, put it in an HTML input hidden field in the form, and recalculate at post time to verify that the fingerprint match, and that stardatePOST-stardateGET<timelimit.

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Perishable Press is operated by Jeff Starr, a professional web developer and book author with two decades of experience. Here you will find posts about web development, WordPress, security, and more »
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