Turnitinbot exploits webserver vulnerabilities?

["Keith T. Morgan" <keith.morgan () terradon com>]

Our IDS picked up this request against one of our webservers and I
couldn't find a reference to it via a quick google search:
 
GET /scripts/boo.bat/..%C1%9C..%C1%9C..%C1%9C..%C1%9C.%C1%9C..%C1%
9C..%C1%9Cwinnt/system32/cmd.exe?/c+echo+MinhaNossaSenhoraDoPe
rpetuoSocorro HTTP/1.0 Host: 216.12.X.X  User-Agent: 
TurnitinBot/2.0 
http://www.turnitin.com/robot/crawlerinfo.html..Accept: 
text/html, text/plain, application/pdf
 
Ok, well, yeah, there's a fairly typical code-red type 
cmd.exe get thing.  No big deal.  But it attempts to exploit 
(ancient) web-server vulnerabilities and echo this 
"MinhaNossaSenhoraDoPerpetuoSocorro" phrase?  Why does it 
include a url to turnitin.com in the exploit attempt? Have they had an
intrusion?
 
 
siglite@hornet:~$ host 64.140.49.68
68.49.140.64.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer cr4.turnitin.com.
siglite@hornet:~$ host cr4.turnitin.com
cr4.turnitin.com has address 64.140.49.68
 
Well, the host resolves both ways to cr4.turnitin.com.

> From www.turnitin.com/robot/crawlerinfo.html:
 
"Chances are that you are reading this because you found a 
reference to this web page from your web server logs. This 
reference was left by Turnitin.com's web crawling robot, also 
known as TurnitinBot. This robot collects content from the 
Internet for the sole purpose of helping educational 
institutions prevent plagiarism. In particular, we compare 
student papers against the content we find on the Internet to 
see if we can find similarities. For more information on this 
service, please visit www.turnitin.com"

> From www.turnitin.com:

"Recognized worldwide as the standard in online plagiarism 
prevention, Turnitin helps educators and students take full 
advantage of the Internet's educational potential. Used by 
thousands of institutions in over fifty countries, Turnitin's 
products promote originality in student work, improve student 
writing and research skills, encourage collaborative 
learning, and save valuable instructor time."

I fail to see how exploitation of old webserver 
vulnerabilities, and the execution of a "boo.bat" file serves 
the purposes they're listing above.  So exactly what kind of 
crawler is this?  An exploit crawler?  Are we going to see it 
hitting SSL sites next?  Building a database of vulnerable 
servers?  Are they running a rudimentary sploitbot? 
I emailed them directly but failed to receive a response.  
That was last week sometime.  Figured I'd give the list a heads-up.



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