What is Apache Synapse?
- by Aren B
My website keeps getting hit by odd requests with the following user-agent string:
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; Synapse)
Using our friendly tool Google I was able to determine this is the hallmark calling-card of our friendly neighborhood Apache Synapse. A 'Lightweight ESB (Enterprise Service Bus)'.
Now, based on this information I was able to gather, I still have no clue what this tool is used for. All I can tell is that is has something to do with Web-Services, and supports a variety of protocols. The Info page only leads me to conclude it has something to do with proxies, and web-services.
The problem I've run into is that while normally I wouldn't care, we're getting hit quite a bit by Russian IPs (not that russian's are bad, but our site is pretty regionally specific), and when they do they're shoving wierd (not xss/malicious at least not yet) values into our query string parameters.
Things like &PageNum=-1 or &Brand=25/5/2010 9:04:52 PM.
Before I go ahead and block these ips/useragent from our site, I'd like some help understanding just what is going on.
Any help would be greatly appreciated :)