Fergie's Tech Blog

Hoax e-Mail Warns About 'Nasty Virus'

Via Virus Bulletin News.

Over the last few days an email, written in German, has been seen circulating warning users about a 'nasty virus' that is infecting millions of websites. The email indicates that making a simple change to the robots.txt file in the website's main directory will prevent the site from being infected, and provides instructions on how to do so.

Of course the email is a hoax. While there have been mass-infections of websites recently, they cannot be undone or prevented by editing the robots.txt. In fact, the only effect this will have is to prevent any page on the website from being indexed by search engines. As the use of robots.txt by webcrawlers is a convention rather than a means of disabling access to website content, it does not even prevent malicious webcrawlers from looking for possible vulnerabilities in server software.

posted by Fergie @ 3/17/2008 12:14:00 PM