Category Archive 'Viruses and Worms'

10 Mar 2010

Senate Warned Against Reading Drudge

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Fox News detects a partisan slant in potential virus warnings pertaining to Drudge Report, one of the most active and infliential agggregators on the Internet, whose reporting commonly, but not always, features a conservative perspective.

[A]n e-mail is circulating warning U.S. Senate staffers not to view one of the most popular news sites on the Web, claiming it could spread computer viruses.

The Senate Sergeant-at-Arms, the chamber’s official gatekeeper, said the Drudge Report, a news aggregator, and whitepages.com, a telephone directory site, “are responsible for the many viruses popping up throughout the Senate,” according to an e-mail from the Environment and Public Works Committee obtained by FoxNews.com.

Another e-mail from a separate office warned that staffers who had visited the Drudge Report or White Pages had experienced viruses on their PCs.

“Please avoid using these sites until the Senate resolves this issue,” the e-mail read. “The Senate has been swamped the last couples (sic) days with this issue.”

But the Drudge Report suggested that politics might be behind the warning, noting in an original story that the e-mail came as the “health care drama in the Capitol reaches a grand finale.”

The Drudge Report noted that it served more than 29 million pages Monday without an e-mail complaint about “‘pop ups,’ or the site serving ‘viruses.'” …

A spokesman for the Environment and Public Works Committee said the Senate Help Desk cited the Drudge Report and whitepages.com only as possible examples of Web sites generating pop-up ads that might be causing a recent increase in the number of virus infections.

“Our non-partisan systems administrator notified both Majority and Minority staff that this issue had been brought to her attention,” the spokesman said in a written statement. “It is still not exactly clear where the increase in viruses is coming from, and staff have been advised to be cautious with outside Web sites at all times.”

A GOP aide to the Environment and Public Works Committee told FoxNews.com that there has been “a flurry of activity in the last couple of days” and that a couple of people on the staff had had “computer problems.”

But Brent Baker, the vice president for research and publications at the Media Research Center, wondered why the conservative Drudge was cited as an example instead of a liberal site like the Huffington Post.

I look at Drudge Report daily and I’ve seen no evidence to suggest that there is any legitimate basis for such warnings at all.

21 Apr 2007

Real Solution to School Shootings

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And to the production of computer viruses.

In the Netherlands, private enterprise has found it.

10 Apr 2007

Volokh Address Working Again

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Yesterday, I followed up a link from Glenn Reynolds and discovered that the conventional Volokh Conspiracy url: www.volokh.com was working just fine again.

Last month, it was impossible to access that eminent legal blog using that address from several East Coast computers. My theory was that someone with a grudge against that blog had distributed a Trojan which overwrote that address in the Hosts File. I was planning to edit my Registry one of these days to fix the problem, but then Glenn Reynolds mentioned hearing about the problem, and identified an alternative working URL: www.Volokh.Powerblogs.com, eliminating the need to go to all that trouble.

I’m glad the issue is gone, but I wish I knew what really happened.

19 Mar 2007

Volokh Conspiracy Access Problem

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On March 14 I reported finding it impossible for several days, since around March 10 or 11, to access the Volokh Conspiracy Blog at its conventional address: www.volokh.com.

Clearly, my experience with this problem is not unique, since Glenn Reynolds blogged about this yesterday (March 18).

Professor Reynolds kindly supplies a solution which saves all of us affected the necessity of logging into our computers in Safe Mode and searching the Registry for a corrupted Host file.

All one needs to do is use Volokh.Powerblogs.Com instead.

Hat tip to Walter Olson.

12 Jun 2006

Yamanner Worm Hits Yahoo Today

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If you subscribe to any Yahoo Groups email lists, you have undoubtedly been hit today by numerous copies of a worm. I’ve seen about twenty copies this afternoon, all stopped by PC-cillin.

Information Week warns:

A new worm targeting Yahoo’s Web-based e-mail service bent on collecting addresses for a spam database has been spotted in the wild, a security company warned Monday.

The “Yamanner” worm exploits a JavaScript vulnerability in Yahoo’s Web mail, Cupertino, Calif. security specialist Symantec said in a Monday morning warning to customers of its DeepSight Threat Management System. Yamanner is spreading, added Symantec, which has assigned the threat a “2” in its 1 through 5 rating system.

The worm targets addresses with the “yahoo.com” and “yahoogroups.com” domains, and arrives as an HTML message containing JavaScript. As soon as the recipient views the message, the script automatically runs to spread the worm to other users in the Yahoo address book. The message will have a From” address of av3@yahoo.com and a Subject: of “New Graphic Site.”

“Harvested addresses from the address book are then submitted to a remote URL, which is likely to be used for a spam database,” noted Symantec in its alert.


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