Tech How to access restricted content & paid content for free by changing User Agent

[zawali]

Changing user agent string can help sometimes access restricted or paid content for free.

Example:
bloomberg.com have some articles that you cannt read for free, you will need a paid subscription to have access to them, but you can access and read them for free without paying a subscription by just changing user agent to Googlebot
Try to access this article https://www.bloomberg.com/news/featu...-horror-movies and you will notice that you cannot read it until buying a subscription. Now install this extension https://chrome.google.com/webstore/d...bampogmaanbfkg and use it to change your user agent string to Googlebot then click Apply then refresh the web page, notice now that you have full access to the article and you can read it.

[plsureking]

if they're not smart enough to check the reverse ip of a search bot, then they deserve to get ripped off. they have shitloads of overpaid engineers too.

i only allow authenticated search engine bots on our network. the rest of the bots, spiders, pirates, etc can fuck off. none of our sites need to be indexed in Zanzabar. most spiders are just making lists for pirates.

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[NatalieK]

holy free access batman...


seriously though, interesting discovery!

[Klen]

Originally Posted by plsureking

if they're not smart enough to check the reverse ip of a search bot, then they deserve to get ripped off. they have shitloads of overpaid engineers too.

i only allow authenticated search engine bots on our network. the rest of the bots, spiders, pirates, etc can fuck off. none of our sites need to be indexed in Zanzabar. most spiders are just making lists for pirates.

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Yes but problem with some bots, bing for example, they offer some sort of public VPN/whatever which is used by attack bots, so you might thinking how it's legal because owner of ip is microsoft while in reality it's not, they just own ip. So you need to have exact ip ranges of search engine bot and whitelist it to make it work.

[plsureking]

Originally Posted by Klen

Yes but problem with some bots, bing for example, they offer some sort of public VPN/whatever which is used by attack bots, so you might thinking how it's legal because owner of ip is microsoft while in reality it's not, they just own ip. So you need to have exact ip ranges of search engine bot and whitelist it to make it work.

ya i see those bastards daily lol

their activity gives them away tho. why you trying to hit wp-login from a hosted IP? that's one of my honeypots since we don't host WP.

google and amazon are also fuckface hosts allowing hackers to run scripts. google at least IDs their search bots.

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