Directory / Security scanners

oBot

Verifiable

The web crawler of the Content Security Division of IBM Germany Research & Development, which crawls pages and classifies their content into more than 65 categories to build the URL-filter database shipped in IBM's content filtering products and OEM SDK. The crawler page explains that the name predates IBM — it comes from ONLY Solutions GmbH, which built the crawler in the late 1990s — and that the token was deliberately never renamed so that existing robots.txt entries keep working. The operator documents its user agent, its address ranges and a hostname to check them against.

Operated by IBM Deutschland Research & Development GmbH · Official documentation

User agents

Patterns this directory matches, with real observed strings.

  • regexoBot/\d
  • observedMozilla/5.0 (compatible; oBot/2.3.1; +http://www.xforce-security.com/crawler/)

How to verify

Documented static ranges: 206.253.224.0/24, 206.253.225.0/24, 206.253.226.0/24, 194.153.113.0/24, 161.156.29.32/27, 2001:1be0:1000:160::/64, 2001:1be0:1000:167::/64, 2001:1be0:1000:168::/64, 2001:1be0:1000:169::/64, 2a03:8180:1c01:c1::/64

IP ranges (10)

Refreshed daily from the operator's feed. Also available as /data/ips/obot-crawler.ips and /data/bots/obot-crawler.json.

161.156.29.32/27
194.153.113.0/24
2001:1be0:1000:160::/64
2001:1be0:1000:167::/64
2001:1be0:1000:168::/64
2001:1be0:1000:169::/64
206.253.224.0/24
206.253.225.0/24
206.253.226.0/24
2a03:8180:1c01:c1::/64

Good Bot Practices scorecard

  • Identifies honestly

    Stable UA token documented (1 pattern)

  • Verifiable

    Verifiable

  • Respects robots.txt

    Honors robots.txt (token: oBot)

  • Behaves

    Crawl-rate behavior is operator-declared; not machine-verifiable from this dataset

  • Reachable operator

    Operator and documentation published

Measured against the Good Bot Practices.