Early in March 2025, I noticed that a web crawler with a user agent string of
meta-externalagent/1.1 (+https://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/webmasters/crawler)
was hitting my blog’s machine at an unreasonable rate.
I read a paper titled Cybercrime is (often) boring: maintaining the infrastructure of cybercrime economies.
I have a grudge against spammers, SEO, and similar low-lifes. When and where I run Internet-facing web servers, I send “SEO search engines” down an infinite rabbit hole of web pages and images.
This is something:
Something upwards of 40% of all Internet websites use WordPress blogging software. WordPress is written in the PHP programming language. Because PHP has a lot of quirks, and because just about any wanker can come along and crap out a solution to any given problem, WordPress installations have traditionally had security flaws. That makes WordPress installations subject to a lot of shady activity.