A summary of the BPImageWalker Internet robot. Including details for the owner, description, HTTP user agent and whether this robot adheres to the robot exclusion standard.
Who owns the BPImageWalker robot? Is it a good or a bad robot? And why is it visiting your website?
Shown below is a sample log file entry for the BPImageWalker web robot. It’s derived from an Apache web server log file. From the log entry information about how the robot identifies itself, HTTP User Agent, and where it is hosted are given.
Server Log File
vntweb.co.uk 158.106.67.143 - - [25/Mar/2019:20:45:31 +0000] "GET /wp-content/uploads/2015/10/add-google-translate-to-your-website-start.png HTTP/1.1" 301 386 "-" "BPImageWalker/2.0 (www.bdbrandprotect.com)"
HTTP User Agent
BPImageWalker/2.0
IP Addresses
The observed IP address was 158.106.67.143.
WHOIS DNS command gives the following information about the IP address:
| NetRange: | 158.106.64.0 – 158.106.127.255 |
| NetName: | APTUM-TECHNOLOGIES |
| OrgName: | COGECODATA |
| Address: | 191 The West Mall |
| City: | Toronto |
| PostalCode: | L4W 4T9 |
| StateProv: | ON |
| Country: | CA |
| Updated: | 2019-11-25 |
As can be seen from the above the observed IP address is a part of a block assigned COGECODATA.
Owner
Brandprotect Inc
Country
Canada
Exclusion
The user-agent string includes a reference to the website www.bdbrandprotect.com.
At the time of review the website returned a 404 error message. A whois search shows the domain registered with GoDaddy, but no account ownership revealed.
Looking at the Internet Archive it can be seen that at around 2011 there was a redirect to www.brandprotect.com.
Looking at this website today it shows that BrandProtect and PhishLabs have merged.
Searching on the website no references are returned regarding the bot supporting the robots exclusion text and also obeys the crawl delay.
The BrandProtect/PhishLabs website does not provide details about how their robot complies with the robots.txt exclusion standard, which was described at http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/exclusion.html#robotstxt, but is not currently available. Information is available on the same website https://www.robotstxt.org/robotstxt.html and also on the w3c website at https://www.w3.org/TR/html4/appendix/notes.html#h-B.4.1.1
You may wish to try including the following entry in the robots.txt file to prevent BPImageWalker from visiting your site
As is common with website crawlers there is a delay between changes made to the robots.txt file and the change being implemented.
Take care making changes to the robots.txt file. A misunderstanding in configuration or an error in configuration can lead to important search engines excluding your website.
Further Info
Phishlabs’ website provides details on the company’s activities. These a highlighted as digital risk protection and email intelligence & response.
The company provides monitoring and protection. Highlighted areas include:
- domains monitoring
- ransomware protection
- social media protection
- brand protection
- account takeover protection
- BECprotection
- executive protection
- data leak protection
