My website got, this morning, a thousand /apple-touch-icon.png requests in the space of a few hours. I have no such file, and they all got 404'd. Now, I understand these requests are from mobile devices, and I understand that an easy way to avoid an error is to put in some placeholder file. That's not my question. My question is why in the world did I suddenly get bombarded with requests for that file, from many many different IPs? If this were a persistent bot, it would be coming from one or a few IPs, no?
Some people just don't like to see 404s in their logs. I really don't care. In fact, it takes 218 bytes to serve that 404 and would take more to serve a real png.
But my question is, what's going on? Is this some sort of a recognized "attack"?
Well, OK, the answer I was directed to was to the question I said I was NOT asking. What I was wondering was why I would be suddenly flooded with requests for that file. I assume the easy answer is "Because people with mobile devices suddenly became aware of your GREAT website!" OK, maybe something on it went viral, but I wasn't flooded with favicon requests at the same time. So my website must have been very suddenly enormously popular just to people with mobile devices. Um, must be a better explanation than that.
Well, the flood I saw this morning took about six hours to dissipate, and now everything is back to normal. Strange ...