Deutsche Bahn: No information under Linux

“Thank you for traveling with Deutsche Bahn” – if you use Linux, you currently can't easily get to the tickets that end with the famous announcement. Since the end of last week, reports from affected users have been increasing, stating that they are confronted with error messages on the Deutsche Bahn website that suspect them of being bots and prevent further searching.

For example, on Reddit, users are reporting this behavior, and a screenshot of the displayed error page can also be found there. The error code 751 is displayed, and the error message in plain text reads: “We are sorry, an error occurred during this process. Your browser's behavior resembles that of a bot.” In the specific example, this occurred on Tuesday evening, but colleagues from the editorial team had already fallen victim to this error detection on Friday, May 15th.

Lockout from the Deutsche Bahn website: Countermeasure possible

Anyone who doesn't necessarily want to spontaneously switch operating systems can help themselves by setting the User Agent in their browser. If you replace “Linux” with “Windows” there, you will get access again and can search for and book a connection on the railway website. The counter-test reveals a lot. If you give a Firefox under Windows 11 a Linux identifier, the behavior also occurs under Windows. Support may suggest switching to Chrome, but even there: lockout if “Linux” is included in the User-Agent, the tip doesn't help. This can even be provoked with Safari under macOS.

If you want to try it yourself, calling up “about:config,” clicking on “accept the risk” in Firefox, and then searching for “general.useragent.override” will bring up the corresponding entry, which can be set as a string by clicking the “+” button. To reset, interested parties need to search for the entry again and delete the change by clicking the trash can icon.

Specifically, the website bahn.de can usually always be accessed. However, if you start a request for connection search under Linux, the error message appears. For some, it appears earlier, on the very first attempt; for others only after clicking through three times at different times.

When asked by heise online, Deutsche Bahn has not yet been able to provide any information as to why this behavior is occurring and whether changes are planned. We will update this if a statement is received.

Most recently, the website of Deutsche Bahn was noticed due to an outage in mid-February of this year, which was attributed to a DDoS attack.

(dmk)