Must strange site visitor user agent be avoided? If yes how?

user_2173890 0
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I am using shared hosting.
My site was showing "ERR_CONNECTION_REFUSED".
So i went to see visitors to my (SSL) site.
I found that instead of regular names in the "User Agent" list,
cpanel visitors list is showing

user agent Expanse indexes the network perimeters of our customers. If you have any questions or concerns, please reach out to: scaninfo@example.com"

I want to know whether this is harmful and if yes,
How to avoid such unknown user agents?
Is there something i should do with ".htaccess" file?
Once again, i am using shared hosting (so, i have limited accessibility).

cpanel .htaccess user-agent security performance
1 Answers

The ERR_CONNECTION_REFUSED you saw when accessing your website had nothing to do with the visitor you saw in cpanel. You might have had a different issue with your server configuration/shared hosting provider.

That "visitor" was an internet crawler, most likely from Palo Alto Networks, who owns Expanse. Long story short, it shouldn't cause any harm. They say that their crawlers are used to index/categorize URLs around the internet and/or to spot malicious content.

I advise you to ignore it, since there's not much you can do - I assume they have some ranges of IPs for their crawlers so you wouldn't be able to blacklist all of them anyway.

user_54546840
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