RE: Turnitinbot exploits webserver vulnerabilities?

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

<snip>
> I believe turnitin.com is a legitimate service - it might be 
> worthwhile to notify them that their crawler is possibly 
> being abused. Apparently turnitin.com's crawler might not 
> have checks to prevent these scans.
<snip>

I didn't think about the possibility that someone's exploiting their
service.  Based on their claims, they spider the web for plagarism,
presumably in academic papers.  It's highly possible that someone's
cracked it and has turned it into a sploitbot by saying "search the web
for a paper containing ....cmd.exe?.....

I did contact them last week about it.  I sent a message very similar to
the original one posted here, to every published email address on their
site.  I received an automated response from one of them.  It probably
replied to me and then copied the message to /dev/null.  I guess I could
be a good netizen and pick up the phone...
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