I recently spent a week fixing my son's Windows XP computer after it was infected with a virus on the same day the machine's Norton 360 subscription ran out. As I was going from PC to PC in the house updating Norton, a virus infected a bunch of Windows system files and began sending out hundreds of Russian Viagra spams. Norton apparently stops protecting you from viruses the second the subscription ends. I expected it to stop offering updates, but I didn't know it would refuse to scan new files using its existing ... read more

J.P. Morgan Chase Credit Card customers have been unable to check credit card activity online or pay credit card bills for at least 12 hours Tuesday. Currently, customers trying to log into their accounts on Chase.Com get the message, "This website is temporarily unavailable. We're working quickly to restore access, and we encourage you to log on later. Thanks for your patience." The site offers customers access to credit card information, checking and online bill paying services. The credit card provider has ... read more

Several web sites I've visited today, including Time Magazine and Planet 107.3, are triggering a malware warning in Google Chrome: The website at www.planet93.com contains elements from the site bin.clearspring.com, which appears to host malware -- software that can hurt your computer or otherwise operate without your consent. Just visiting a site that contains malware can infect your computer. For detailed information about the problems with these elements, visit the Google Safe Browsing diagnostic page for ... read more

I was reading news stories this afternoon on MSNBC when one of its pages triggered a malware warning in Google Chrome: The website at www.msnbc.msn.com contains elements from the site adrotator.mediaplex.feed-mnptr.com, which appears to host malware -- software that can hurt your computer or otherwise operate without your consent. Just visiting a site that contains malware can infect your computer. According to Google's safe browsing alert for that feed-mnptr.com domain, it has contained three trojan programs ... read more

The political weblogger Andrew Sullivan, who has been covering the protests in Iran around the clock for several days, reported early Monday that his site appears to be suffering a denial of service (DOS) attack intended to knock it offline: The Atlantic is struggling to keep the site up despite what seems to be a digital attack. Please be persistent in trying to reload. Sullivan's site, which has been passing along updates from the election protests in both English and Farsi, has been unusually slow to load ... read more

Since 4 a.m. Friday, a computer at a Swedish IT company made more than 1.5 million web requests to my web site URouLette, which links to random web pages stored in a MySQL database. They're coming in at a speed of 38 requests a second. My MySQL database server can't handle that many requests, so by Friday afternoon Workbench and a bunch of other sites slowed to a crawl as the web server began belching black smoke. A massive crash was imminent. The last time somebody did this, I used the Linux utility iptables to ... read more

WordPress has issued an urgent upgrade for users who downloaded WordPress 2.1.1 within the past 3-4 days: It was determined that a cracker had gained user-level access to one of the servers that powers wordpress.org, and had used that access to modify the download file. We have locked down that server for further forensics, but at this time it appears that the 2.1.1 download was the only thing touched by the attack. They modified two files in WP to include code that would allow for remote PHP execution. This is ... read more