I have the same problem on my own sites. I've added a blackhole that seems to, at least partially, mitigate the problem.

  1. Added an entry in my robots.txt:
    User-agent: *
Disallow: /secret/bla.php

    [download]
  2. Added a hidden link to the main page to an inbetween page that is never visibly linked anywhere. This mainly prevents that annoying pre-loading in chrome triggers anything.
  3. The inbetween page links to /secret/bla.php
  4. All IPs of clients navigating to /secret/bla.php get firewalled.

It's not perfect, but i was able to reduce bot traffic (no matter what UserAgent was set) by roughly 50%-80%. It's only a temporary win in the war against china and the silicon valley crowd, of course. But every little bit helps.

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In reply to Re: Anonymous Google Chrome browsers now under additional scrutiny by cavac
in thread Anonymous Google Chrome browsers now under additional scrutiny by Co-Rion

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