It’s not a secret that bots and crawlers can have a negative impact on the performance of online stores. Not everyday you come across a user agent that looks very legit, but is in fact a bot generating lots of unwanted traffic. In this article we share all the insights we gained about this illegitimate Chrome User Agent.
How we found the Chrome user agent
Every weekday members from our tech and support team group up and analyze all Hypernodes that popped-up in our monitoring over the last 24 hours. This enables us to proactively look at trends, errors and events happening on different Hypernodes and prevent problems from happening before they even occur.
During one of these Hypernode analyses we noticed a very specific, significant old Chrome User Agent. Since this was not the first time we encountered a User Agent related to a Chrome version from 2018 causing problems on Hypernodes, we immediately knew what to do.
The Chrome User Agent:
User agent Chrome 68.0.3440.75
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/68.0.3440.75 Safari/537.36
How we prevented millions of illegitimate requests
After a quick research we found that it was doing over a million requests in a time period of (only) 10 hours. By blocking it everywhere in our NGINX configuration, we made it impossible for the fake Chrome user agent to disturb our clients any longer.
Always on top of stability: we’ve got your back!
The quality of your e-commerce hosting has a major impact on the stability of your webshop. Unwanted traffic can lead to performance issues and, worst case, downtime. Every minute your shop is slow or unavailable, you miss out on revenue. Potential customers cannot reach your site and therefore cannot find information about your brand and your products. Most importantly, no purchases can be made as your shop is down. By pro-actively monitoring the performance of the webshops we host, we ensure a stable platform.
Interested in what Hypernode hosting can do for your webshop in terms of performance, stability and security? Request a free trial and try our platform for 14 days!
Hi! My name is Dion, Account Manager at Hypernode
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