Security

News Sites Try to Load Malware from Eclampsialemontree.net

For the last four days, my anti-virus software has been blocking a possible virus when I visit some popular news sites. The URL flagged as a virus is a subdomain of eclampsialemontree.net that has a long string of random characters and looks highly suspicious. A report on VirusTotal indicates two anti-virus providers are blacklisting that domain as a malware site. The latest site where I encountered this virus alert was a story on Stars and Stripes. I'm not embedding a link for obvious reasons, ... (read more)

2016/05/30

Stopping Viruses on Windows XP with ESET NOD32

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 ... (read more)

2010/10/29

Chase.Com Website Down for Hours

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 ... (read more)

2010/09/14

Google's bin.clearspring.com Warning Explained

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 ... (read more)

2010/07/31

Google Flags MSNBC.Com as Malware Site

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 ... (read more)

2010/03/11

Andrew Sullivan, Iran News Sites Under Denial of Service Attack

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 magazine 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 ... (read more)

2009/06/15

Sweden Declares War on My Web Server

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 ... (read more)

2008/12/20

Cracker Adds PHP Exploit to WordPress 2.1.1

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 ... (read more)

2007/03/03

Sold Cell Phones Reveal Customer Secrets

A company that makes phone-security tools bought 10 phones on EBay and shared their contents with a reporter, finding evidence of marital affairs, business deals and other juicy private information. One phone surrendered the secrets of a chief executive at a small technology company in Silicon Valley. It included details of a pending deal with Adobe Systems Inc., and e-mail proposals from a potential Japanese partner: "If we want to be exclusive distributor in Japan, what kind of business terms ... (read more)

2006/08/30

Dell Recalls 4.1 Million Laptop Batteries

Dell is recalling 4.1 million batteries from its laptop computers because they have the unfortunate tendency to burst into flame, as these photos demonstrate. The recall covers four models of Dell laptops sold from April 2004 to July 2006: Potentially affected batteries were sold with the following models of Dell notebook computers or separately as secondary batteries: Latitude: D410, D500, D505, D510, D520, D600, D610, D620, D800, D810 Inspiron: 500M, 510M, 600M, 700M, 710M, 6000, 6400, 8500, ... (read more)

2006/08/15

Read More Entries