FYI - Tech Alert

Pls read the article, and get your PC ready before Summer:

http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2012/05/25/google-warns-hundreds-thousands-may-lose-internet-in-july/?test=latestnews

For what it is worth, for any who may quesion the legitimacy of the article, my personal opinion is that it is indeed legitimate.

Not everyone is affected, but if you go to google and see such a warning, first thing - MAKE SURE YOU ARE ACTUALLY ON www.google.com - then please take the warning seriously.

I doubt anyone will here be affected, however.

Thanks for the heads up, Elhanan.

Thanks! I had seen this sooner last month, and after checking my system, promptly forgot about it. Ahh! The pleasures of getting older!

From what I understand, it is not the infection that will halt your system, but the intended fix that will be implemented this Summer.

Actually, its a bit more confusing than that.

The infected systems had their internet 'website address book' (also called 'DNS' - domain name server, which is the technical term) redirected to a different, malicious 'website address book'.

The FBI found the bad guys and was considering shutting down their whole system, but then realized that the millions of infected machines who had been redirected to these bad guys' malicious system would lose all their internet access as a result - because your computer uses that 'website address book' in order to connect to any website you go to. If you have no DNS, then you cannot get to websites.

Instead of leaving all those folks stranded, instead, they cleaned the bad guys' malicious 'website address book' system so it was safe, and left it running for an extended period so infected machines would not lose internet access for a certain period.

That period is coming to an end, however. Hence the warnings.

This morning after updating MS Security (and before my first Diet Coke), I became somewhat annoyed at all that we have to do to play, browse, etc. because there are vandals out there with nothing better to do than spoil life for others.

Personally, my empathy for these cretins is faded, and hope that the book, shelf, and library are thrown on top of each of these kind of folks.

I dont mean to express overly militant sentiment.... but if it were up to me, cybercrimes would mandate capital punishment.

To ruin such a wonderful thing as computing and the internet for everyone, whether for fun or for greed or for politics or for religious goals is, to me, beyond deplorable and worthy of nothing more than an end to the perpetrator's life.

Saw some reports this morning warning users to disable Java, as it is supposedly open to hacker attacks. I have done so, but am curious about it all. What does Java actually do for my system? Based on a little reading, it is a language, but do I actually utilize it?

Thanks for any helpful info for this Techles One.

Java is used in web pages for applets (web applications with interactive features), and if you disable it, then you will not be able to view and use the cool interactive content on some web pages.

I haven't seen any emergency report about Java, although it can be hacked like any other program. But if you keep it updated, then the developer will surely be keeping up with the latest threats that could invade it and use it.

Here is a link to one such report:

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2414191,00.asp

Threats like this are why I use a multi-layered approach to browser security.

I use antivirus, anti malware, hosts file innoculation, openDNS, malicious IP filtering, comodo firewall, firefox's NoScript add-on, and run both my browser and my email client within a sandbox.

Keeping things up to date, or disabling vulnerable software is good, and will limit exposure to threat, but if you happen to be unlucky enough to encounter a zero-day vulnerability that has yet to be announced or detected, the only things that can help are passive layers of protection.

^ heh! I even recocognozed a couple of those! You are safe from me, dave!