How to block Cookie Hub
Operated by CookieHub. Used to detect cookies set by websites (for CookieHub clients) and verify if user consents are respected
How it identifies itself
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/131.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 CookieHubScan/3.0
robots.txt
What the agent asks to be told. It obeys this or it does not — nothing enforces it.
User-agent: Cookie Disallow: /
nginx
In the server block, then reload.
# In the server block. 403 rather than 444: a closed connection tells the
# operator nothing, and an agent that gets a status code can log it.
if ($http_user_agent ~* "(Cookie|Cookie Hub)") {
return 403;
}
Apache
In .htaccess or the vhost.
BrowserMatchNoCase "Cookie" bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase "Cookie Hub" bad_bot
<RequireAll>
Require all granted
Require not env bad_bot
</RequireAll>
Cloudflare
Security → WAF → Custom rules.
# Security → WAF → Custom rules, action: Block (http.user_agent contains "Cookie") or (http.user_agent contains "Cookie Hub")
WordPress
A child theme's functions.php, or a small plugin.
// functions.php of a child theme, or a small plugin. Runs before WordPress
// builds the page, so a blocked agent costs one PHP process and no queries.
add_action('init', function () {
$agent = $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'] ?? '';
foreach (['Cookie', 'Cookie Hub'] as $needle) {
if (stripos($agent, $needle) !== false) {
status_header(403);
exit('Blocked: Cookie Hub');
}
}
});
robots.txt is a request. The rules below it are the wall.
Cookie Hub publishes a token, so the directive above will work for as long as it keeps honouring it — and nothing except its own good manners makes it. The server rules match on a header the requester sets, which stops the agent that says who it is and not the one that copies somebody else's name. Botscope verifies identity against DNS and published address ranges, records which check decided each request, and shows you the ones that lied.