Baidu Spider appearing on robots.txt

[IceIcebaby]

Hi, I'm not too sure what to do about this or what to think of it.

This magically appeared in my companies robots.txt file (literally magically appeared/text is below)

User-agent: Baiduspider
User-agent: Baiduspider-video
User-agent: Baiduspider-image
Disallow: /

I know that Baidu is the Google of China, but I'm not sure why this would appear in our robots.txt all of a sudden. Should I be worried about a hack? Also, would I want to disallow Baidu from crawling my companies website?

Thanks for your help,
-Reed

[IceIcebaby]

Thanks for your help Travis, that was a really solid answer.

[Travis_Bailey]

There's a possibility someone in your company saw suspicious traffic from an actor spoofing the Baidu user agent. It can get so aggressive that it will eventually bog down your response time through sheer number of requests. But the problem is that same actor, or someone else with malicious intent can simply spoof another user agent or IP.

But the main problem is, the site is straight e-commerce. It could get international business, so why take such a ham fist approach? Even if blocking Baidu gave the desired result, the dev/admin would still have to block individual IP blocks as they come in. It would make more sense to invest in server resources so it can handle the load, or look into DDos Mitigation.

So yeah, it's strange. Though it's more likely a lack of understanding than anything malicious.