Why is my site being scanned by Messagelabs and Chinanet

Gaspode posted this at 13:18 — 6th March 2009.

Joined: Mar 2009

Forgive me if these seem like silly questions as I'm new to this. I recently wrote a website (nothing fancy, no bells and whistles just CSS with a javascript menu) for my local village in the UK and uploaded it. Since then, I get accessed a couple of times a day by MessageLabs and Chinanet. They never take much, just look at the CSS coding or the javascript - maybe the odd jpg or gif- usually getting an HTML code 304. What are they up to? Why would China net be interested in my very amateur CSS skills for a small village website in the UK showing the contact details for the village cricket club?
Does everybody get this or does message labs suspect me of something of sending viruses or something? Am I paranoid? As I say, I'm new to this so any help would be appreciated.

Gaspode

greg posted this at 13:42 — 6th March 2009.

He has: 1,581 posts

Joined: Nov 2005

Well, messagelabs will likely be checking your site has no viruses/nasties.
I'd never heard of them , but a quick look on their webby pretty much verifies this.

<a href="http://www.messagelabs.co.uk/products/web-security-services/web_spyware">Messagelabs Website</a> wrote:

Be confident that all web requests (including web pages, images and larger files such as PDFs, or media) are free from malicious code before they reach your employees.

To maintain their claim, they will be checking websites all the time.

By "China net" do you mean "chinanet.com"?
If so, it's very possible they are just "looking", either a human viewing, or some automated "thing" their site has for whatever reason.

But I would guess you actually meant "ChinaNet" which explains a load more...

<a href="http://whitepapers.techrepublic.com.com/abstract.aspx?docid=177819">techrepublic.com Website</a> wrote:

ChinaNet is a public Internet service network operated by China Telecom. ChinaNet currently has more than 21 million broadband subscribers, with a total capacity of 4,000 Gigabits per second (Gbps), accounting for more than half of China's bandwidth for Internet services.

As your site will be registered with search engines etc, it's reasonable that some people out of the 21,000,000 ChinaNet internet users have found the site by accident.

As long as your server logs (etc) don't show any malicious activity, like many password attempt failures etc, then I would say there is nothing to worry about.

BTW, being overly cautious or suspicious is a good thing when coding or managing a website. "Never trust anyone" is the golden rule. I know it sounds anti-social and a lack of faith in the human race, but on the internet you only need to let your guard down a bit and the brown stuff can hit the windy swirly thing at a great rate.

joeyreyes posted this at 06:36 — 3rd April 2012.

They have: 20 posts

Joined: Feb 2012

That is most likely a bot. There's nothing to worry about.