How to block Thousand Eyes Cloud Agent
Operated by Thousand Eyes. ThousandEyes monitors network infrastructure, troubleshoots application delivery and maps Internet performance, all from a SaaS-based platform.
How it identifies itself
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_14_6) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/97.0.4692.71 Safari/537.36 (ThousandEyes Agent)
robots.txt
What the agent asks to be told. It obeys this or it does not — nothing enforces it.
User-agent: Thousand 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 ~* "(curl/7.58.0-DEV|Thousand|Thousand Eyes Cloud Agent)") {
return 403;
}
Apache
In .htaccess or the vhost.
BrowserMatchNoCase "curl/7.58.0-DEV" bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase "Thousand" bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase "Thousand Eyes Cloud Agent" 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 "curl/7.58.0-DEV") or (http.user_agent contains "Thousand") or (http.user_agent contains "Thousand Eyes Cloud Agent")
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 (['curl/7.58.0-DEV', 'Thousand', 'Thousand Eyes Cloud Agent'] as $needle) {
if (stripos($agent, $needle) !== false) {
status_header(403);
exit('Blocked: Thousand Eyes Cloud Agent');
}
}
});
robots.txt is a request. The rules below it are the wall.
Thousand Eyes Cloud Agent 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.