InfoSecDashBot
Who we are
InfoSecDash is a cybersecurity news site that summarizes reports from specialized outlets — originally in Spanish, with this English edition built on the same content. For each report we publish our own summary, shorter than the original, with attribution to the outlet and a direct link to the full article. We don't republish anyone's text. You can read the full process in our methodology.
How to identify it
Our agent always identifies itself with this string, and never disguises itself as a browser:
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; InfoSecDashBot/1.0; +https://infosecdash.com/bot)
If you see automated traffic claiming to be InfoSecDashBot but behaving differently from what's described below, it isn't us — anyone can copy a User-Agent string. Let us know if that happens.
What it does
It reads the public RSS feed of a small number of cybersecurity outlets. When it finds a story we haven't processed yet, it may download that one article page, once, to write the summary. Nothing more.
- It doesn't crawl your site looking for links: it only visits the URLs your own feed announces.
- It never requests a page it already processed. Each URL is downloaded once, ever.
- It doesn't download images, stylesheets, scripts, or attachments.
- It doesn't try to access content behind a paywall or a login. If it can't read the article, it gives up and uses the excerpt the feed itself provides.
- It doesn't store or publish your article's text. It's used to write the summary and then discarded; the only thing saved is our own summary.
- It doesn't use your content to train AI models.
What it respects
Before downloading any page, the bot checks your site's
robots.txt
and follows what it declares:
- If a path is disallowed for our agent or for
*, it isn't downloaded. - If you declare a
Crawl-delay, we respect the interval you ask for between requests to your domain. If you don't declare one, we still wait at least one second. - If your server errors out on the
robots.txtrequest, or denies access to that file, we don't download anything from that domain: when in doubt, we assume no.
How to block it
Add this to your site's robots.txt and we'll stop downloading your articles on the next run:
User-agent: InfoSecDashBot
Disallow: /
That stops the page downloads. If you'd also rather your stories not appear summarized on the
site at all, that's a different thing and doesn't depend on robots.txt:
write to us and we'll remove your outlet from our sources. We don't ask
for explanations or set conditions.
AI model training
The opposite of what most of the industry does: this site is open to training artificial
intelligence models. We don't block GPTBot, ClaudeBot, CCBot, or any other training crawler in
our robots.txt, and we don't plan to.
We also declare it in machine-readable form, under the W3C's TDM Reservation Protocol, at
/.well-known/tdmrep.json, with
tdm-reservation: 0.
The reason is consistency: this site exists thanks to language models, and it would be hard to justify using them ourselves while shutting the door on whoever builds them. We ask — knowing it isn't enforceable today — that the source be cited when the system allows it. The details are in section 5 of the terms of use.
Contact
For any question about the bot's behavior, to report anomalous traffic, or to ask that we stop including your outlet, use the contact form.