How to block Foregenix ThreatView/WebScan
Operated by Foregenix Limited. Foregenix perform security and risk scanning on the web sites of eCommerce merchants for a number of banks and card brands globally. The service assists these organisations in controlling and identifying fraud and financial losses, with a particular focus on trying to identify compromised merchants before they end up in the card brand's compromise investigation process. Early detection (prior to fraud losses escalating) can save the banks and merchants alike considerable sums. The solution has two primary modes of operation Scanning for active malware, this normally entails pulling a very limited number of pages within a sandboxed context for analysis at various stages of DOM initialisation. From the target sites perspective, the operation is simply another browser requesting a small number of pages as normal. Scanning for known publicly exploitable vulnerabilities and outdated software solutions as these attributes are frequently exploited by threat actors to introduce malware targeting financial information. Typically a complete scan comprises less than one hundred requests and is already rate limited on our side. Scanning is always "passive" in nature, relying on GET, HEAD and OPTIONS requests only. The scanning heads by default abide by the "robots.txt" file but this can be overridden by the scan initiator (usually one of our banking clients). This override, to force a scan/assessment is not actioned all that frequently.
How it identifies itself
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko, Foregenix) Chrome/91.0.4472.77 Safari/537.36
robots.txt
What the agent asks to be told. It obeys this or it does not — nothing enforces it.
User-agent: Foregenix 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 ~* "(Foregenix|Foregenix ThreatView/WebScan)") {
return 403;
}
Apache
In .htaccess or the vhost.
BrowserMatchNoCase "Foregenix" bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase "Foregenix ThreatView/WebScan" 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 "Foregenix") or (http.user_agent contains "Foregenix ThreatView/WebScan")
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 (['Foregenix', 'Foregenix ThreatView/WebScan'] as $needle) {
if (stripos($agent, $needle) !== false) {
status_header(403);
exit('Blocked: Foregenix ThreatView/WebScan');
}
}
});
robots.txt is a request. The rules below it are the wall.
Foregenix ThreatView/WebScan 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.