A summary of the startmebot Internet robot. Including details for the owner, description, HTTP user agent and whether this robot adheres to the robot exclusion standard.
Who owns the startmebot 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 startmebot 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
www.vntweb.co.uk 54.81.183.225 - - [13/Jun/2019:03:30:40 +0100] "GET /restore-remote-desktop-access-after-scw/ HTTP/1.1" 200 8749 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; startmebot/1.0; +https://start.me/bot)"
HTTP User Agent
startmebot/1.0
IP Addresses
The observed IP address was 54.81.183.225.
WHOIS DNS command gives the following information about the IP address:
| NetRange: | 54.72.0.0 – 54.95.255.255 |
| NetName: | AMAZON-2011L |
| OrgName: | Amazon Technologies Inc. |
| Address: | 410 Terry Ave N. |
| City: | Seattle |
| StateProv: | WA |
| PostalCode: | 98109 |
| Country: | US |
| Updated: | 2017-01-28 |
As can be seen from the above the observed IP address is a part of a block assigned to Amazon Technologies Inc.
nslookup DNS command gives
225.183.81.54.in-addr.arpa name = ec2-54-81-183-225.compute-1.amazonaws.com.
Owner
start.me
Country
The Netherlands
Verification
The Slack website confirms example uses of their robot user-agent string:
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; startmebot/1.0; +http://www.start.me/bot)
Exclusion
The user-agent string includes a reference to the website https://start.me/bot.
The startmebot is used to identify accesses made to websites with the aiming of retrieving information about:
- a website’s title
- the favicon
- the contents of the RSS feeds offered by a website
It is confirmed that the robot doesn’t operate as an indexing robot.
Currently their robot doesn’t support 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.
Details are given about managing the robot accessing a website by sending an email.
There is also a page answering the question: Is start.me malware, a virus or a malicious site?
Further Info
Start.me provides a “modern-day bookmark manager”.
Using start.me bookmarks and links can be managed on a customisable dashboard.
The site confirms that start.me is a browser extension providing a new tab page which is a redirect to https://start.me.
