Hack Attack: When AI Bots Go Wild on WordPress!
“Stupid WordPress scans? Think again! Those “%%target%%” URLs are actually OpenAI’s bots, not clueless hackers. With GPTBot and ClaudeBot on the prowl, your site’s style.css might just be their next target. Stay sharp, and maybe rethink that ‘password!’ password.”
Hot Take:
Who knew that the “%%target%%” in your URLs wasn’t just another lazy hacker’s attempt at breaking into your WordPress site, but actually OpenAI’s little bots scouring the internet for content? It’s like finding out the robocaller that’s been bugging you all week is actually your long-lost cousin doing market research… kind of.
Key Points:
- Scans with “%%target%%” in URLs are linked to OpenAI’s content-gathering bots.
- The user-agent of these bots is: Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; GPTBot/1.2; +https://openai.com/gptbot).
- Anthropic’s Claude also joins the party with fewer scans.
- OpenAI’s scanning activities are predominantly responsible for the “%%target%%” pattern.
- Threatlist APIs are available to help manage this bot traffic.
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