What is the source of /path/(null) requests?

Question

We are beginning to see requests in our Apache Logs in the form

/abc/(null)

These requests all have MSIE 8.0 and Trident 4.0 in the User-Agent field. The requests began to appear when we hadn't deployed any changed code for several weeks.

What is the source of these requests? Is this a bug in MSIE 8?

What is a systematic way to determine if this is a browser bug, javascript library bug or an issue with our code?

-Kam

Answer 1

It's likely either a buggy browser, buggy plugin, or a bot. There are a lot of bots out there crawling websites (badly) and pretending to be browsers.

I wouldn't worry about it unless it's actually causing a problem.

Here's a discussion of the (null) requests and how to block them: http://www.webmasterworld.com/apache/3837651.htm