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.

Posted on 17 March 2008 by

Virus Bulletin