If they believe that uncontrolled 3rd-party clients would make it easier to breach their protocol (because they know their protocol's weaknesses), it would make sense to be openly hostile to 3rd-party clients.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_through_obscurity
The argument for security for disallowing other clients would be being able to modify the protocol to patch out security issues without worrying about compatibility with other clients.