Blogger Attack Update
Blogger has published a swift response to the BBC News item I reported yesterday as Blogger Under Attack (title link). Blogger users will find the explanation and advice on Blogger Buzz. For Blogger visitors, don't panic! The malware raided address books in order to send its spam, and it grabbed mail2blogger e-mail addresses and posted spam on those blogs. As I wrote before, I don't send posts to Coxsoft Art News using e-mail. So none of this spam appeared on my blog.
posted by Unknown @ 1.9.07
2 comments
2 Comments:
Hi Coxsoft,
There was definitely some weird stuff going on online at the end of last month. Organised crime is cashing in big time.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/youandyours/items/01/2007_36_mon.shtml
“Operation Bot Roast”
"The FBI has warned more than a million computer users that their PCs have been hijacked by criminals using botnets....
Links;
http://www.mynetwatchman.com/tools/sc/
http://www.spamhaus.org/
http://www.getsafeonline.org/
"
From what I've seen, I wouldn't be surprised if a huge number of computers were infected without knowing it, but we can at least now download some free tools to detect bot incursions into our privacy.
I don't fancy waking up to find that all my files have been encrypted by some parasite who wants paying to decrypt them, just for one thing.
Hi, Dorothea
Google did some research into this a while ago, and it estimates 10% of the world's computers are infected. That's a much bigger figure than the FBI's. The FBI is interested only in US computer users.
SpyBot is a must. It's the best spyware hunter/killer. But it's not a virus killer and it's not a firewall. You need one of those too. Or both.
Find SpyBot at:
http://www.safer-
networking.org/en/
index.html
I'm using an out-of-date edition of AVG. My P.C.'s so old it won't run the latest version or accept updates.
One of my work colleagues was contacted by her ISP to tell her she was sending lots of spam and they'd pull her plug if she didn't stop it. She had no idea her P.C. had been taken over by spamming malware!
A worse case: the family P.C. of a friend's brother was taking about an hour to "warm up" whenever it was switched on. It had been taken over so thoroughly that it spent the first hour after bootup sending spam! And the brother was clueless!
SpyBot, AVG and a few other utilies cleared it all out, but it was a morning's work for my friend.
So, these nasties work in the background - the joy of multi-tasking - and you don't know they're in your P.C. until it slows down or you run SpyBot.
Another useful utility is Browser Hijack Blaster. It stops nasties infecting your browser. It even blocked my ISP, which wanted to stick its logo on IE6. No thanks, ISP.
My P.C. is armed to the teeth, but occasionally something gets through. Must run SpyBot tomorrow!
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