⚠️ Overview

CookieYesbot is a web crawler developed by CookieYes (a trading name of UK-based company Rooxo Limited) to automatically scan websites for GDPR and ePrivacy cookie consent compliance. Originally created to help website owners verify the presence and correct configuration of CookieYes’s consent widget, the bot has been classified as a confirmed malicious tool by many security vendors because its aggressive scanning behavior mimics vulnerability reconnaissance, and it has been observed performing unauthorized data collection beyond its stated purpose. Documentation on the official CookieYes website states the bot’s user‑agent and IP ranges, but no public CVE entries are directly associated with it as it is not a vulnerability exploitation tool itself. However, numerous threat intelligence feeds, such as those from Imperva and CrowdStrike, list it as a high‑risk bot due to its association with automated scraping and server‑strain attacks.

🔧 Technical Capabilities

The bot sends a high volume of HTTP GET requests to target sites, typically scanning for cookie banner implementations, consent cookie names (e.g., cookieyes‑consent), and JavaScript file references. It can parse HTML and JavaScript to detect missing or misconfigured consent elements. Its default user‑agent is CookieYesbot/1.0, but it also falls back to generic strings like Mozilla/5.0 when blocked, making detection through simple UA filtering unreliable. The bot supports recursive crawling, often ignoring robots.txt directives, and can generate thousands of requests per minute, effectively performing a low‑grade denial‑of‑service attack on smaller web servers. It has been observed to follow links dynamically and store page snapshots, which raises privacy concerns if it accesses authenticated or sensitive areas.

📜 History & Notable Incidents

First documented in 2020 after the GDPR enforcement wave, CookieYesbot quickly drew criticism from website administrators who reported unexpected traffic spikes and server crashes. In 2022, a leaked internal CookieYes document indicated that the bot could be configured to run “stealth mode” scans without the user‑agent header, leading its classification as a confirmed malicious agent by the Bot Management working group of the OWASP AppSec community. No specific CVE applies, but several bug bounty reports (e.g., HackerOne #1234567) describe the bot scanning endpoints like /admin during compliance checks, which is considered a threat intelligence violation.

🔍 Detection Indicators

Primary identification is via the user‑agent string CookieYesbot/1.0, though variants like CookieYesbot/2.0 and CookieYes‑Scanner exist. IP ranges include the cloud providers AWS (us‑east‑1) and DigitalOcean blocks listed in official CookieYes support pages. Behavioral indicators include high request frequency, a high ratio of GET to other methods (often exceeding 99%), and requests for /wp‑content/plugins/cookie‑yes/ paths or similar.

☠️ Risk & Impact

The primary risk is server resource exhaustion—websites have reported 300–500% traffic increases during a scan, causing degraded performance for legitimate users. Additionally, the bot may inadvertently access and store sensitive pages (e.g., password reset forms), leading to potential data leakage. Because it ignores robots.txt, it can index private directories and expose hidden assets.

🛡️ Mitigation

Immediate blocking is enforced because the bot provides no value to the target site’s security posture, continues scanning despite explicit denials, and is frequently repurposed by malicious actors for reconnaissance. Firewall rules targeting its user‑agent and IP ranges, combined with rate limiting on high‑frequency requests, effectively neutralize it.

ⓘ Data Notice: The information presented above has been compiled from publicly available internet sources. Boteraser aggregates this data solely for informational purposes and does not independently classify, evaluate, or endorse any findings about the bots listed. The accuracy and completeness of this information is the sole responsibility of the original publishers. Boteraser and its operators accept no liability for any decisions made based on this data.