I was surfing last weekend when my computer started doing strange things ,then my screen turned black and message i got after reboot was that windows had shut down my system to protect my computer. I tried everything safemode,scanning with norton-knocked out ,malwarebytes-knocked out, avira-knocked out. so i tried booting from cd-rom found no windows installation on any of my drives,it was like the website in us i was browsing cleaned all my 3 hard drives. so i reinstalled and started the pain full recovery of every drive for selected files.Then i came across these.


THIRD WAVE OF CYBER ATTACKS UNDER WAY NOW

N. Korea suspected in Web-site attacks
Government and private sites were affected in U.S., S. Korea. Evidence was still being checked.

By Lolita C. Baldor

Associated Press

WASHINGTON - U.S. authorities yesterday suspected North Korea as the origin of the widespread cyber attack that overwhelmed government Web sites in the United States and South Korea, although they warned it would be difficult to definitively identify the attackers quickly.

The powerful attack that targeted dozens of government and private sites underscored how unevenly prepared the U.S. government is to block such multipronged assaults.

While Web sites of the Treasury Department and Federal Trade Commission were shut down by the software attack, which lasted for days over the holiday weekend, other sites such as those of the Pentagon and the White House were able to fend it off with little disruption.

Among other targets of the most widespread cyber offensive in recent years were the National Security Agency, Homeland Security Department, State Department, Nasdaq, New York Stock Exchange, and Washington Post, according to an early analysis of the software used in the attacks.

The cyber attack did not appear, at least at the outset, to target internal or classified files or systems, but instead was aimed at agencies' public sites, creating a nuisance both for officials and the Web consumers who use the sites.

A possible North Korean link, described by three officials, more firmly connected the U.S. attacks to another wave of cyber assaults that hit government agencies Tuesday in South Korea. The officials said that while Internet addresses have been traced to North Korea, that does not necessarily mean the attack involved the Pyongyang government.

South Korean intelligence officials have identified North Korea as a suspect in their attacks and said that the sophistication of the assault suggested it was carried out at a higher level than just rogue or individual hackers. U.S. officials would not go that far and declined to discuss publicly who might have instigated the intrusion.

The cyber assaults are known as "denial of service" attacks. Such attacks against Web sites are not uncommon and are caused when sites are so deluged with Internet traffic that they are effectively taken off-line.

Mounting such attacks can be relatively easy and inexpensive, using widely available hacking programs, and they become far more serious if hackers infect and tie thousands of computers together into "botnets."

The cyber assault on the White House site had "absolutely no effect on the White House's day-to-day operations," said spokesman Nick Shapiro. He said that preventive measures kept whitehouse.gov stable and available to the general public, but that Internet visitors from Asia might have experienced problems.

All federal Web sites were back up and running, Shapiro said. A State Department spokesman said that agency's site was up but still experiencing problems. A Web site for the U.S. Secret Service had experienced access problems but did not crash, the agency's spokesman said.

"We see attacks on federal networks every single day, and measures in place have minimized the impact to federal Web sites," said Amy Kudwa, spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security.

Joe Stewart, director of malware research for the counter-threat unit of SecureWorks Inc., said there was no indication yet of a claim of responsibility hidden anywhere in the program behind the attacks. He and other researchers were analyzing the code for clues to the attacker's identity.

Stewart noted that the attacks on U.S. government sites appeared to expand after the initial assaults over the holiday weekend failed to generate any publicity. He said the "target list" contained in the program's code had only five U.S. government sites on it July 5, but was broadened the next day to include nongovernment sites inside the United States.

The next day, the South Korean Web sites were added. "It seems to me they thought the first round wasn't successful . . . they felt they weren't getting enough attention because nobody was talking about their attacks," Stewart said.

Dale Meyerrose, former chief information officer for the U.S. intelligence community, said that at least one of the federal-agency Web sites got saturated with as many as a million hits per second per attack - amounting to four billion Internet hits at once. He would not identify the agency, but he said the Web site was generally capable of handling a level of about 25,000 users.

Meyerrose, who is now vice president at Harris Corp., said the characteristics of the attack suggested the involvement of 30,000 to 60,000 computers.

Officials both inside and outside government agreed yesterday that the incident brought to the forefront a key 21st-century threat. James Lewis, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said the fact that both the White House and Defense Department were attacked but didn't go down pointed to the need for coordinated government network defenses.

"It says that they were ready, and the other guys weren't ready," he said. "We are disorganized. In the event of an attack, some places aren't going to be able to defend themselves."

---

We choose to go to the moon and to do other things, we choose to go to the moon not because its easy but because its hard. kennedy

I was surfing last weekend when my computer started doing strange things ,then my screen turned black and message i got after reboot was that windows had shut down my system to protect my computer. I tried everything safemode,scanning with norton-knocked out ,malwarebytes-knocked out, avira-knocked out. so i tried booting from cd-rom found no windows installation on any of my drives,it was like the website in us i was browsing cleaned all my 3 hard drives. so i reinstalled and started the pain full recovery of every drive for selected files.Then i came across these.

It pays to keep Windows, Internet Explorer, and Anti-virus updates current. Best to use a browser other than Internet Explorer.

And of course, stay off those porn sites. ;)

I wish i knew how to write those codes that can do so much harm ,i think i would have written one that would send those guys to stone age. I blame microsoft for all these mess why do they design an operating system whose core files interact directly with what the computer is doing at a particular time. they should have designed an os were by new files are loaded each time and core files cant be changed that easily ,I think the world should sue them for all they have got.
second why not give there source cord to an agency that can help them do that ,instead of so called daily updates which could actually be viral updates.Those of you who know more about these should help us understand these loop holes like why design an os that needs an antivirus ,cant the os be designed in such a way that it cant be infected.Are the companies who write these antivirus codes actually writing the virus themselves.

---

We choose to go to the moon and to do other things, we choose to go to the moon not because its easy but because its hard. kennedy

its not the amount of code its the amount of bots sending the code.

---

In a rich man's house there is no place to spit but his face.
Diogenes Of Sinope

I think the world should sue them for all they have got.

Frivolous law suits never solve the problem, they just tie up time in the court system and make people who think like you feel better about themselves.

second why not give there source cord to an agency that can help them do that

Are there agencies out there that do this sort of work? Moreover, what's the point of employing programmers if you're just going to have an "agency" look it over? Why not just hire the agency's programmers?

,instead of so called daily updates which could actually be viral updates.

There's no logical reason to send out viral updates. Such thinking is overtly paranoid in nature. There has been updates that were not very well tested before they were sent out, but these are simply human error and are not malicious like your original suggestion.

Those of you who know more about these should help us understand these loop holes like why design an os that needs an antivirus ,cant the os be designed in such a way that it cant be infected.Are the companies who write these antivirus codes actually writing the virus themselves.

It is impossible to write an OS that doesn't need an Antivirus, only one that isn't targeted by hackers with malicious intent. All a "virus" is is a program that is written to take advantage of poorly written code on your system such as a flaw. All operating systems, including Unix have flaws in their code because they are written by humans. The more secure you design an OS, the less user friendly it is by nature. Hence, the opposite is true: the more user friendly an operating system is, the less secure by nature. Finding the right balance is the ongoing struggle of Microsoft.

Unix, Linux and Mac OS do not support nearly as much as Windows tries to; they are limited in what hardware they can run on, hence the code is limited. Linux is getting much better at this than the other two, but it still isn't at the level of support Windows is at. Because Windows is so large and does so much, it is far easier to have flaws in the code, and it can be quite hard to test every single nuance of every single function on every single configuration running on every single piece of hardware all with user-specifiable options in their configurations. This makes Windows an easy target.

Suggesting that, by "requiring" anti-virus software, that somehow Microsoft is benefiting from this by writing the virus themselves would be quite insulting to any programmer out there. Microsoft has hired many respected programmers who have worked for many large corporations before joining Microsoft, and they would never put their own morals or reputation on the line by purposely writing an OS that had holes just to write viruses to take advantage of said holes. Such flaws in their code only serve to make the user experience worse, which means less satisfied users, which means more people switching away from their code to someone else's. This, of course, is completely absurd, and goes against the basic business concept of keeping users happy and trying to gain more users.

I'm sure that if such perfect code were possible, Microsoft, of all corporations, would be trying to write that perfect code if in the least to finally silence conspiracy theorists who insist they write flawed code purposely, and at the most would love to be the first to write perfect code to stick it to their competitors as is common in business to have the better product.

---

You know more about computers and programmers than me and i accept what you say,That means we shall stay with viruses for ever.

---

We choose to go to the moon and to do other things, we choose to go to the moon not because its easy but because its hard. kennedy

Kasule,
You're a doctor. How much success has there been in eliminating viruses in your line of work?

Robert we have controlled many and eliminated small pox except for the few samples
kept in us and russia, but then again our viruses are mostly controlled by vaccination and i believe if there was more funding available and if developed nations spent alot more effort in that line , we would have eliminated alot more but except for the retroviruses which keep on changing there outer coats to evade the bodies immunity. But we dont yet have the capability to rewrite the human gene sequence and create supper humans, yet may be in the future only god knows how ,but the differences between medicine and computing is that humans can i believe write an operating system that is totally immune from codes that infect them though ozzfan tells me it cant be done by for example creating an os that loades original files each time you start your computer and whose files cant be changed, the core functon files but that i think would mean it would be something like an os and a sub os were of course you would install your files ,anyway i know very little about how programs interact in an os so i could be offside totally.

---

We choose to go to the moon and to do other things, we choose to go to the moon not because its easy but because its hard. kennedy

but the differences between medicine and computing is that humans can i believe write an operating system that is totally immune from codes that infect them though ozzfan tells me it cant be done by for example creating an os that loades original files each time you start your computer and whose files cant be changed, the core functon files but that i think would mean it would be something like an os and a sub os were of course you would install your files ,anyway i know very little about how programs interact in an os so i could be offside totally.

Its completely possible to have the OS stored in an area of memory that can't be written to, such as ROM (Read-Only Memory).

The problem with such a concept is that the ROM would have to be quite large to fit an entire, functional OS. Of course, you could have a minimal OS that just provides basic functions, like the original ROM BIOS (a Basic Input/Output System). If the entire OS were to fit into ROM, like BIOSes, any bug fixes or upgrades would require a complete replacement of the ROM, which would make the processes very tedious and prevent people from upgrading their existing OS unless they took it into a professional to upgrade or they bought a new one.

You could always use EEPROMs, or Electrically Erasable Programmable Read-Only Memory that can be written to for upgrades using a special piece of software, but then all a hacker would need to do is reverse engineer this software for their own use to corrupt the OSes.

One of reasons why the computer industry has had the success that is has is that people can upgrade their computers as they wish, when they can afford it. Upgrading the OS on an older computer has always been a way to extend your Return On Investment in your hardware you purchased a few years prior. Of course it won't make the hardware any better at the more advanced computing algorithms, but for most people under basic tasks like word processing and internet activity, an upgraded OS just extends the support they receive from the manufacturer without having to spend more money on hardware.

Convenience and cost is why OSes aren't put out on ROM chips. Like I said in my last post, user-friendly computers are more successful and easier to target for viruses.

---

The major thing that gets MS in trouble is the amount of data they include in their OSes. THere are so many developers working on different sections of the OS that it's fairly easy to see how one Programmer could write something that inadvertently deactivates or prevents another Programmers code to work properly. the more info they include or change from their previous OSes means another chance at a glitch backdoor or flaw allowing some malicious fool to exploit their flawed code

---

In a rich man's house there is no place to spit but his face.
Diogenes Of Sinope

I think anther problem comes from Mother board designers, why i say so is that
i dont see a future in computing were 50% of our time is spent on upgrades, scanning for viruses etc , like ozzfan said if an os can be put on read only memory card that i can plug into my mother board and it gives me the funtions i need ,thats all i want. May be the Nasa guys would want all the advanced funtions but that would be there choice. You know i was so attacked by these viruses that i had to come up with my on way to defend my machine , this is how i did it.
I made a clean installation of windows, after i rebooted my computer to safe mode
went to windows folder clicked on security and denied permission for anything apart from the adminstrator even the owners to change any file that whole folder, i.e even the system cant write in that folder or make changes but me .Then i went and turned of update of windows.and then rebooted the machine and installed the other programs in normal way. it has worked well for me ,at least the machine is running.So in future oses should be put on a rom card or drive that can be plugged into the mother board if some one wants anther alternative ,he can as well install in the old fashion way on the Hard drive.

---

We choose to go to the moon and to do other things, we choose to go to the moon not because its easy but because its hard. kennedy

like knoppix linux?

---

In a rich man's house there is no place to spit but his face.
Diogenes Of Sinope

Every one who reads this please take care ,what i am writting is for real

a very bad virus is on the way ,it spreads by email ,and is called postcard. do not and i said dont open any file with an attachment postcard or a file called post card .If you do the what appears as a postcard burns your c drive.no jokes guys spread the word.

---

We choose to go to the moon and to do other things, we choose to go to the moon not because its easy but because its hard. kennedy

Every one who reads this please take care ,what i am writting is for real

a very bad virus is on the way ,it spreads by email ,and is called postcard. do not and i said dont open any file with an attachment postcard or a file called post card .If you do the what appears as a postcard burns your c drive.no jokes guys spread the word.

Information from snopes.com regarding the postcard virus hoax: http://www.snopes.com/computer/virus/postcard.asp

Basically, an email arrives stating that an e-postcard or similar from a friend or family member can be read at address such and such. Clicking on the link sends you to a web site that installs malware or worse on your system.

Solution: don't click on links you are not expecting from someone, and usually not even then.

yep nothing new there. the best bet is to just delete from anyone not familiar to you.

---

In a rich man's house there is no place to spit but his face.
Diogenes Of Sinope

Twitter, Facebook Face DDoS AttackTechtree News Staff, Aug 07, 2009 1656 hrs IST
Popular social networks suffer outage with age old Denial of Service attack


Yesterday, two major social networks Twitter and Facebook suffered from Denial of Service attacks. Millions of Twitter users were unable to access the micro-blogging site since it was reportedly down. Soon, the Twitter team updated that it was defending against a DDoS (Distributed Denial-of-Service) attack. The DDoS attack occurs when a large number of requests are sent masked as legitimate ones and make the service non-functional.
Max Kelly, chief security officer of Facebook, told CNET that the profile of a Georgian blogger named Cyxymu's Twitter, Facebook, Live Journal and Blogger was targeted which resulted into Twitter outage, eventually affecting other sites. All the services are now restored while Twitter still suffers from hiccups and latencies.

Last night's Twitter outage might not have bothered many but the affected sites did bother millions of users. Biz Stone, Twitter Co-Founder, updated on the official Twitter blog that the site has been working closely with the companies and services affected by the 'massively coordinated' attack. Twitter still suffers from latencies due to which several users are unable to post or follow other users.

It's evidential that this was massively co-ordinated attack in which large number of machines might have been used as botnets. Kelly said, "It was a simultaneous attack across a number of properties targeting him to keep his voice from being heard. We're actively investigating the source of the attacks and we hope to be able to find out the individuals involved in the back end and to take action against them if we can." So, it's unlikely that a single machine managed to create this havoc.

Facebook and Google have been able to minimize the impact of the DDoS attack on the respective sites. Nevertheless, it's not the first time loop hole in Twitter's code was exploited. The 17-year old Mikeyy Mooney did try to warn Twitter about the holes which were taken care of later. Stone assured that no user data was compromised in this attack.

Though Twitter is live and functional now, just hold your patience till it gets completely restored. Meanwhile, you can enjoy reading what Twitter users did when Twitter was down.

---

We choose to go to the moon and to do other things, we choose to go to the moon not because its easy but because its hard. kennedy

I wonder if the DDOS attack came from Iran.....

If anyone has a beef with Twitter, it's the crumbling government in Tehran.

The nut case in Pyongyang is still admiring his picture taken with Clinton. I doubt its from North Korea.

---

Join the PACK!

Its not n.korea these time,i just used the thread .I wonder what are all the antiviruses and firewalls doing on all those hijacked machine ,that they let such large scale distributed computing kick A''S to happen ,i thought the whole use off these programs was to check for illegal codes out and into the computer, what has the world come to! that anyone can write a code and start a distributed computer pandermic . I just cant get it may be some one should clarify. Secondly the internet operates on node structure ,how come the nodes cant be indetified and shut before all these occurs. Suggestion restructure the whole internet or some day we shall all be nuked by it.

---

We choose to go to the moon and to do other things, we choose to go to the moon not because its easy but because its hard. kennedy

This is partly for you and partly for OzzFan...

switch to Linux, problem solved! :)

---

www.artpruple.co.uk

This is partly for you and partly for OzzFan...

switch to Linux, problem solved! :)

I've tried several distros, and they all suck. The problem was actually bigger with Linux in that I could not really do anything I wanted to.

What did I do about it? Went back to Windows, problem solved! :)

---