Yet another Internet attack

Just a note. This from Jerry Pournelle's web site.

Fun stuff, the Internet:

Associated Press
Jun. 24, 2004 06:04 PM

CHICAGO - Government and industry experts warned late Thursday of a mysterious, large-scale Internet attack against thousands of popular Web sites. The virus-like infection tries to implant hacker software onto the computers of all Web site visitors.

Industry experts and the Homeland Security Department were studying he infection to determine how it spreads across Web sites and find adequate defenses against it.

"Users should be aware that any Web site, even those that may be trusted by the user, may be affected by this activity and thus contain potentially malicious code," the government warned in one Internet alert.

The mysterious infection appeared to target at least one recent version of software by Microsoft Corp. to operate Web sites, called its Internet Information Server, popular among businesses and organizations.

A spokesman for Microsoft declined to comment immediately.

Experts said the attack's effects were unusually broad but weren't substantially interfering with Internet traffic.

My wife had something funck happen while on amazon today, but it looks my firewall saved us

BTW, I use Computer Associates Firewall and Virus protection. Haven't had any problems since I installed this stuff about 60 days ago.

I had an interesting thing happen with this. A web site downloaded an .exe file to my computer and tried to run it. I use Linux so nothing should have happened. But recently I've been using something called "wine". Not really a emulator, but it's a translation program that allows some Windows programs to run under Linux natively. Wine thought I wanted to run the .exe and so started runing it. Yeow!

Then a system message pops up saying that this web site is trying to run a "spurious" program, did I want to continue? I said no and the thing exited without damage or trace. Never thought that having wine installed could cause this sort of issue. I'll have to re-think this.

This kind of thing is making the computer exactly what I didn't want, another hobby! This thing should be like a toaster, unbreakable. This kind of virus chasing is cutting into my practice time

I have a couple of exe files running around in my computer, and our crash pad computer in St. Louis has an annoying one too. They allow pop-ups even with a pop-up blocker, and use the time between using the back button and receiving the page( I guess, this isn't my hobby) to insert new, unsolicited info. Some of it is not so nice.

Have fun,
Chris...

I've run Zone Alarm's "Black Ice" Firewall for the last couple of years.

Lately, I have rec'd several warnings from my firewall that there have been break-in attempts (I run DSL) but NOTHING can get through Zone alarm! PLUS, If you're a cheapnik, you can get it free!

Really, the internet is just like the rest of the world. It's astoundingly interesting and as such, can be a dangerous place to play around. If you want to be perfectly safe in your computing, stay off the internet. Otherwise, get strapped.

As far as I'm concerned, the Homeland Security Dept. is probably SPREADING these virises! LOL!!!