CMU-Cylab is a bot in the academic research crawlers category, operated by Carnegie Mellon University.
An academic research bot, conducting research on patterns in counterfeit document sales over the internet.
Research crawlers collect pages for university and non-profit studies of the web. Most are low volume and respect robots.txt. Block them there if you prefer not to take part.
CMU-Cylab identifies itself with this user agent string:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/140.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 (CMU-Cylab/1.0; +https://epp-jcalandr-01.andrew.cmu.edu/about.html)Anyone can copy a user agent string. Transfon Security also checks where each request comes from, so a request that claims to be a known crawler but comes from the wrong network is treated as a fake, not as the real crawler.
We have not confirmed whether CMU-Cylab follows robots.txt. Add a rule, then check your logs to see that it stopped. robots.txt is a plain text file at the root of your domain, such as https://example.com/robots.txt.
User-agent: CMU-Cylab Disallow: /
User-agent: CMU-Cylab Disallow: /private/ Disallow: /search
User-agent: CMU-Cylab Allow: /blog/ Disallow: /
User-agent: CMU-Cylab Allow: / User-agent: * Disallow: /
User-agent: CMU-Cylab group, CMU-Cylab ignores your User-agent: * rules, so repeat any that should still apply.CMU-Cylab from CMU-Cylab's user agent; check Carnegie Mellon University's own documentation if it publishes a different robots.txt name.Treat robots.txt as a statement of your policy, and enforce it where requests arrive.
Allow CMU-Cylab if it is a service you use, and keep its visits out of page views and ad requests either way.
Transfon Security for publishersCMU-Cylab is not a person. Exclude it from campaign and conversion data so reports reflect real visitors.
Transfon Security for advertisersAllow CMU-Cylab only if it works for your store, and keep it away from cart and checkout.
Transfon Security for e-commerceIf CMU-Cylab is a service you use, allow it on the endpoints it needs and block it elsewhere.
Transfon Security for SaaS and APIsrobots.txt is a request, not an enforcement. Transfon Security shows CMU-Cylab by name in the Top Bots report, so you can see how often it visits and which pages it reads. Block or allow it with a User Agent rule, or slow it down with a rate limit decision rule.
Transfon Security
CMU-Cylab is a bot in the academic research crawlers category, operated by Carnegie Mellon University. An academic research bot, conducting research on patterns in counterfeit document sales over the internet.
We have not confirmed whether CMU-Cylab follows robots.txt. Add a robots.txt rule, then check your logs to see that it stopped, and block it by user agent if it did not.
Add "User-agent: CMU-Cylab" followed by "Disallow: /" to the robots.txt file at the root of your site. To enforce it, block requests whose user agent contains "CMU-Cylab" at your WAF. In Transfon Security that is one User Agent block rule.
No. robots.txt is voluntary, so CMU-Cylab may not follow it, and anyone can send CMU-Cylab's user agent, so a fake CMU-Cylab ignores your rule. Enforce the rule where requests arrive, at your WAF, and check the source network.
Research crawlers collect pages for university and non-profit studies of the web. Most are low volume and respect robots.txt. Block them there if you prefer not to take part.
Transfon Security identifies every bot in this directory in your traffic reports, flags fake search crawlers, and lets you allow, block or rate limit each bot.
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