General

Code Red II: Dissing default.ida Requests

Websites running on Linux don’t need to worry about Code Red and Code Red II, right? Well, not really…but why let lamer infected IIS sites waste your expensive bandwidth by spurious requests for default.ida (which doesn’t exist on Apache servers, probably the most common Linux webserver)?

I found a cool site that tells how to remedy the problem:
[URL]http://www.thesitewizard.com/news/coderediiworm.shtml[/URL]

Basically, you create a zero-length file in the default directory of your site and name it default.ida. This way, instead of requiring the server to waste bandwidth by returning a 404 (file not found), the requested “file” is sent–but it’s 0 KB, so no bandwidth cost. Nice!