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POPSPC Virus 'Time Bomb' Precautions And Remedies We're less than a day away from a global computer meltdown — or a terrific April Fool's joke. At some point on April 1, the Conficker virus, which has quietly infected millions of PCs worldwide to herd them into a "botnet" of linked machines, will phone home for new instructions. What it'll do next is anyone's guess. It could muster enough silicon firepower to take down any Web site on the planet, or send out enough spam to fill the inboxes of every e-mail user on Earth. It could offer itself up to the highest bidder, mostly likely an Eastern European cybercriminal. Or it could do what it's been doing for months — nothing. If it turns out you are infected, Microsoft's put up instructions on how to clean your PC, but it's not easy. If you're not, downloading and installing Microsoft's latest software updates should protect you.
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POPSBrace For April 1 Computer Attack: "Conficker" Worm Those infections haven't spawned many symptoms, but on April 1 a master computer is scheduled to gain control of these zombie machines, said Don DeBolt, director of threat research for CA, a New York-based IT and software company. All the national news outlets are making it perfectly clear that if you have heard a rumor about a virus that is set to attack computers on April 1, that rumor is now confirmed as fact. I would like to see some of these virus creators treated more harshly. They should have to serve at least 25 years for these computer attacks. Enough is enough. ----------------- Cathy Green is the owner of UpperCrust Maids, LLC and enjoys writing about the service industry and consumer rights.
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POPSConficker worm activates on Apr. 1 The scariest thing about the Conficker worm is that we don't know what it's supposed to do; the infected computers will form what may be the most powerful parallel computer, but to what end? Is it a prank? A giant spam engine? Something more nefarious?
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POPS$250,000 reward for a worm's creator This is of particular interest to me because my Norton/Symantic subscription has just run out, and I cannot afford a re-up until later this month. I guess the bottom line here is no one can afford to risk an infection. What I don't understand is why would a person or persons want to waste all of that intelligence on a destructive program, when they could use it to benefit the world. I think that invasive technology must pay off better than the honest programmers can make. I guess I am truly a naive sentimental fool after all. On the other hand is ½ a million enough to someone to go court as a state's witness, and risk death from retribution by the perpetrators?
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POPSAbout 90 percent of all email is spam: Cisco
This year, botnets were used to inject an array of legitimate Websites with an IFrames malicious code that reroutes visitors to websites that download computer viruses into their machines, according to Cisco. "The botnet is, in many cases, ground-zero for online criminal threats," Peterson said. "Using malware to infect someone's computers is an incredibly common mechanism and harnessing them all together is a way they do their click fraud, spam emails, and data stealing." As computer security vendors such as Cisco get better at protecting machines from hackers and users grow wary of clicking on unsolicited Web links or email attachments, online criminals are turning botnets on Web-based email accounts. Hackers are "reputation hijacking" by using botnets to figure out weak passwords protecting Web-based email accounts, according to Peterson. Weak passwords consist of family names, birthdays, home addresses, or other terms considered relatively easy to deduce.
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POPSComputer Virus Infects Space Station This piece of malware sounds mostly harmless, designed to steal video game passwords. But I'm imagining a hacker causing a satellite to plummet from space onto a US city. It's possible I've been reading too much science fiction.
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POPSBank of America Trojan Dropper An email I received today prompted me to create this page. I wanted to blog this information so that people could become aware of another yet malicious virus program circulating the Internet systems. Perhaps, this menace to our computing well-being should be an important issue for our presidential candidates to address. If it isn't today then I'm sure it will be in the future when threats to society will be of a high-tech, elusive nature which can be more lethal than the WMD intimidation, thrust upon us 7/24. If there is anything that can take our economic stability down faster than Corporate greed, it is the powerful control of our cyber-machines, by cyber-terrorists.
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POPSStorm worm The Storm worm first appeared at the beginning of the year, hidden in email attachments with the subject line: '230 dead as storm batters Europe'. The PC of anyone who opened the attachment became infected and was secretly enrolled in an ever-growing network of compromised machines called a 'botnet'. The term 'bot' is a derivation of 'software robot', which is another way of saying that an infected machine effectively becomes the obedient slave of its - illicit - owner. If your PC is compromised in this way then, while you may own the machine, someone else controls it. And they can use it to send spam, to participate in distributed denial-of-service attacks on banks, e-commerce or government websites, or for other even more sinister purposes.
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