Who Is aocr.org and Why Is It Reading My Blog?

A bit of a post out of the norm but a little investigation into some interesting behaviour I saw in my logs. While tidying up 404 entries on this blog, I kept seeing one referrer in my nginx logs: https://www.aocr.org/. It was linked to old URLs that no longer exist, it hit dozens of posts, and it showed up in my analytics. A new site linking to my work would be nice, however upon further investigation the problem is that aocr.org is the American Osteopathic College of Radiology, and I'm fairly sure they aren't reading about Kerberoasting or NUC lab builds.This post covers how I worked out what it was, what it costs a small site, and the one Cloudflare rule that deals with it. Ege Demir has already published an excellent deep dive on the same bot (tin.computer: the aocr.org referrer bot), and I'll draw on it. Below are my own numbers from an independent vantage point, which line up closely with theirs.TL;DRWhat: a headless Chrome crawler that sends a fake Referer:…

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