Someone made some wp wlwmanifest.xml http requests, but why?

Question

A curious question this time. Someone just made the following HTTP requests to my server:

127.0.0.1 - - [02/Jun/2021 15:28:00] "GET //wp-includes/wlwmanifest.xml HTTP/1.0" 404 -
127.0.0.1 - - [02/Jun/2021 15:28:00] "GET //xmlrpc.php?rsd HTTP/1.0" 404 -
127.0.0.1 - - [02/Jun/2021 15:28:00] "GET / HTTP/1.0" 200 -
127.0.0.1 - - [02/Jun/2021 15:28:00] "GET //blog/wp-includes/wlwmanifest.xml HTTP/1.0" 404 -
127.0.0.1 - - [02/Jun/2021 15:28:00] "GET //web/wp-includes/wlwmanifest.xml HTTP/1.0" 404 -
127.0.0.1 - - [02/Jun/2021 15:28:01] "GET //wordpress/wp-includes/wlwmanifest.xml HTTP/1.0" 404 -
127.0.0.1 - - [02/Jun/2021 15:28:01] "GET //website/wp-includes/wlwmanifest.xml HTTP/1.0" 404 -
127.0.0.1 - - [02/Jun/2021 15:28:01] "GET //wp/wp-includes/wlwmanifest.xml HTTP/1.0" 404 -
127.0.0.1 - - [02/Jun/2021 15:28:01] "GET //news/wp-includes/wlwmanifest.xml HTTP/1.0" 404 -
127.0.0.1 - - [02/Jun/2021 15:28:01] "GET //2018/wp-includes/wlwmanifest.xml HTTP/1.0" 404 -
127.0.0.1 - - [02/Jun/2021 15:28:01] "GET //2019/wp-includes/wlwmanifest.xml HTTP/1.0" 404 -
127.0.0.1 - - [02/Jun/2021 15:28:01] "GET //shop/wp-includes/wlwmanifest.xml HTTP/1.0" 404 -
127.0.0.1 - - [02/Jun/2021 15:28:01] "GET //wp1/wp-includes/wlwmanifest.xml HTTP/1.0" 404 -
127.0.0.1 - - [02/Jun/2021 15:28:01] "GET //test/wp-includes/wlwmanifest.xml HTTP/1.0" 404 -
127.0.0.1 - - [02/Jun/2021 15:28:01] "GET //media/wp-includes/wlwmanifest.xml HTTP/1.0" 404 -
127.0.0.1 - - [02/Jun/2021 15:28:01] "GET //wp2/wp-includes/wlwmanifest.xml HTTP/1.0" 404 -
127.0.0.1 - - [02/Jun/2021 15:28:01] "GET //site/wp-includes/wlwmanifest.xml HTTP/1.0" 404 -
127.0.0.1 - - [02/Jun/2021 15:28:02] "GET //cms/wp-includes/wlwmanifest.xml HTTP/1.0" 404 -
127.0.0.1 - - [02/Jun/2021 15:28:02] "GET //sito/wp-includes/wlwmanifest.xml HTTP/1.0" 404 -

Anyone any idea why someone would try this. I know it has something to do with WordPress (that I don't use/have installed anyway) But I still wonder why someone would try to make these requests.

Thx a lot, Jules

P.S. The server says it comes from localhost but that is because it goes through Nginx

Answer 1

This is commonplace. Today more than 40% of the world's internet traffic are bots and 25% are malicious bots. They are just bots that are constantly looking for possible security flaws in as many indexed domains as possible in order to compromise the site. There are tools that can help you detect these requests and take action. For example fail2ban.

Answer 2

Got the same request too today, no Wordpress installed. I guess its some kind of scanner. It querys for multiple locations

/wp2/wp-includes/wlwmanifest.xml
/site/wp-includes/wlwmanifest.xml
/cms/wp-includes/wlwmanifest.xml
/sito/wp-includes/wlwmanifest.xml
/shop/wp-includes/wlwmanifest.xml
/xmlrpc.php

etc.

got queried from multiple locations. Singapore, USA, South Africa, Australia, India. And this over the whole day long, and switching the location after every scan round. Shouldn't assume anything bad, but also doesn't match the pattern of something like dirbuster/gobuster.

user agent is always: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/80.0.3987.149 Safari/537.36

I also got some querys that look different form the same user agent:

/aaa9
/aad7

anything concerning, or just bots being bots?