ICC-Crawler

ICC-Crawler is a web crawler operated by NICT, Japan’s National Institute of Information and Communications Technology. It collects web content for large-scale computational research.

Primary use cases
– Defender/Intel teams
– Monitor exposure of your BINs/brands and detect surges in compromised cards
– Track seller ecosystems, pricing, and dump/CVV trends for fraud modeling
– Feed threat intel to SIEM/FDS rules, prioritize takedowns, and measure ROI
– Identify compromised merchant clusters (potential skimmer/Magecart outbreaks)
– Criminal/illegal (for awareness; prohibited)
– Discover and compare stolen card inventories across shops/channels
– Set alerts for “fresh” BINs or geographies to optimize cash-out timing
– Automate sourcing and vendor reputation checks to scale carding operations

Note: Possession/use tied to stolen data is illegal in most jurisdictions.

It’s likely performing automated reconnaissance and data harvesting: mapping your site structure and endpoints, scraping pricing/catalog content, extracting PII or email patterns, profiling checkout and payment flows, and fingerprinting your defenses (anti-bot signals, rate limits, error handling). This intel can fuel competitive scraping, account takeover and carding workflows, coupon/loyalty abuse, or targeted exploitation of weak endpoints and APIs. Potential negatives include elevated infrastructure and CDN costs, latency for real users, polluted analytics and funnel metrics, content/IP theft, inventory and price manipulation, discovery of misconfigurations or exposed data, and higher downstream fraud (credential stuffing success, BIN testing efficiency, mule onboarding). It can also increase noise for SOC teams, complicate anomaly baselines, and create compliance risk if regulated data is inadvertently exposed or scraped.

Here are 3 effective ways to block “ICC Crawler”:

1) Block by User-Agent (server-level)
– NGINX:
if ($http_user_agent ~* (ICC[s-]?Crawler)) { return 403; }
– Apache (.htaccess):
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} (ICC[s-]?Crawler) [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [F]

2) IP/ASN blocking (network-level)
– Identify source IPs from logs; block at firewall or server.
– NGINX (inside server/location):
deny 203.0.113.0/24;
– Linux firewall:
iptables -A INPUT -s 203.0.113.45 -j DROP
– Maintain an IP blocklist; revisit periodically.

3) Rate limiting/throttling (behavioral)
– NGINX:
limit_req_zone $binary_remote_addr zone=bots:10m rate=1r/s;
server {
location / { limit_req zone=bots burst=5 nodelay; }
}
– Mitigates scraping even if UA/IPs rotate; combine with 403 on exceed.

Tip: Verify the exact User-Agent string and crawling patterns in access logs to tune rules.