I have to take back what I said just the other day about having seen the worst stealth spider I'd ever seen. The day after I wrote that entry, I saw a worse case.

Like the first one, they made two valid requests to start with and then followed them up with 65 bad ones, all in the span of 11 seconds. Also like the first one, all their requests were bad because they couldn't deal with absolute paths in <a href="...">. But they topped the first one because they lowercased all the URLs.

This right here is me clutching my head like a stunned monkey.

All 67 requests came from 69.56.135.218; according to theplanet.com, this is part of 69.56.135.216/29, assigned to 'PQC Service, LLC' of Wilmington Delaware, zip code 19801. All of the machines have generic reverse DNS. (Some Googling suggests that the company runs porn sites.)