Today I saw a number of requests from various Microsoft Addresses with msnbot/20b as user agent.

This msnbot behaves wrong. It requests sites that neither existed, nor exist, nor will ever exist on this server. Here is an example (caught by mod_security2):

--f59dce4f-A--
[13/Apr/2009:20:10:48 +0300] y67Xt38AAAIAAG26Z64AAAAa 65.55.106.206 48082 213.21.217.206 80
--f59dce4f-B--
GET / HTTP/1.0
Accept: */*
Host: lionessk.livejournal.com
User-Agent: msnbot/2.0b
Connection: Keep-Alive
Cache-Control: no-cache

Requests come from from msnbot-a-b-c-d.search.msn.com hosts, which belongs to the Microsoft Corporation. There are several requests per hour for non–existing host names. For example:

  • 65.55.106.114 — lists.hosef.org
  • 65.55.106.181 — sunsyria.com
  • 65.55.106.124 — opensource.become.com
  • 65.55.106.196 — 404.capitan-trash.com
  • 65.55.106.182 — pa2.php.net
  • 65.55.106.188 — www.server318.com
  • 65.55.106.133 — www.bagenlaw.com

And so on. There are much more entries.

Has someone infected msnbot with something?