Java User Agent

Question

I have recently started seeing user agents like Java/1.6.0_14 (and variations) on my site

What does this mean. Is it a browser or bot or what

Answer 1

This likely means someone is crawling your website using Java. This isn't much of anything to be concerned about unless you notice the crawler using large amounts of your bandwidth or not respecting your robots.txt file. Usually legitimate crawlers will take the time to create custom user agent to make it easy to contact the crawler if you have a problem, but even if they're using the default user agent, it's more than likely perfectly benign.

However, if you do notice a spike in 404 hits or lots of hits from the Java client, you're likely under attack by spammers looking for security holes in your website. If your site is built well, there's not a whole lot they can do other than burn some of your bandwidth, but if they find a security hole, they'll be sure to exploit it. Dealing with spammers properly is beyond the scope of this answer, but a scorched earth solution (which will work as a short term fix at the very least) would be to block all user agents that contain the string 'java'.