Hoax email warns about 'nasty virus'
Phony advice causes removal of site from search engines.
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.
The text of the original email can be found in Virus Bulletin's hoaxes section
here. Users are advised to always make sure that what they are
doing will have the desired effect before blindly following advice given in an email.
17 March 2008
Tags:
hoax, spam.
del.icio.us 
digg this
0 comments
