I have noticed unusual traffic coming from my workstation the last couple of days. I am seeing HEAD requests sent to random character URLs, usually three or four within a second, and they appear to be coming from my Chrome browser. The requests repeat only three or four times a day, but I have not identified a particular pattern. The URL characters are different for each request.

Here is an example of the request as recorded by Fiddler 2:

HEAD http://xqwvykjfei/ HTTP/1.1 Host: xqwvykjfei Proxy-Connection: keep-alive Content-Length: 0 User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/534.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/9.0.597.98 Safari/534.13 Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate,sdch Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.8 Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.3

The response to this request is as follows:

HTTP/1.1 502 Fiddler - DNS Lookup Failed Content-Type: text/html Connection: close Timestamp: 08:15:45.283

Fiddler: DNS Lookup for xqwvykjfei failed. No such host is known

I have been unable to find any information through Google searches related to this issue. I do not remember seeing this kind of traffic before late last week, but it may be that I just missed it before. The one modification I made to my system last week that was unusual was adding the Delicious add-in/extension to both IE and Chrome. I have since removed both of these, but am still seeing the traffic. I have run virus scan (Trend Micro) and HiJackThis looking for malicious code, but I have not found any.

I would appreciate any help tracking down the source of the requests, so I can determine if they are benign, or indicative of a bigger problem. Thanks.