libwww-perl access blocking
Libwww-perl access is often used by botnets and other nasty softwares to scan your site for vulnerabilities. Luckily it is quite easy to block libwww-perl access. Blocking libwww-perl access will increase safety on your server. Here is how it is done.
Open .htaccess file on the site you want to block libwww-perl access, and insert these lines below RewriteEngine On:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} libwww-perl.*
RewriteRule .* – [F,L]
libwww-perl is now blocked, and will not have access to that site again.
Thats it for blocking access libwww-perl in apache.
what is libwww-perl?
From Wikipedia:
LWP (for “Library for WWW in Perl”, also called libwww-perl) is a set of Perl modules that give Perl programming easy access to sending requests to the World Wide Web. libwww-perl provides an application programming interface to an HTTP client as well as a number of HTML utilities, and standard objects to represent HTTP requests and responses.
History
The first generation of libwww-perl was written by Roy Fielding using version 4.036 of Perl. Fielding’s work on libwww-perl provided a backend HTTP interface for his MOMSpider Web crawler. Fielding’s work on libwww-perl was informed by Tim Berners-Lee’s work on libwww, and helped to clarify the architecture of the Web that was eventually documented in HTTP v1.0. The second generation of libwww-perl was based on version 5.004 of Perl, and written by Martijn Koster and Gisle Aas.
Happy blocking!
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