Cornficker: A ‘Digital Pearl Harbor?’
Hide Your Women and Children – Time to Hit Your Electronic Bunkers
Is the New York Times trying to scare me?
Their coverage today of the Cornficker internet worm had some of the following hot licks:
Hot Lick 1 -
Worms like Conficker not only ricochet around the Internet at lightning speed, they harness infected computers into unified systems called botnets, which can then accept programming instructions from their clandestine masters. “If you’re looking for a digital Pearl Harbor, we now have the Japanese ships steaming toward us on the horizon,” said Rick Wesson, chief executive of Support Intelligence, a computer security consulting firm based in San Francisco.
Hot Lick 2 -
“I don’t know why people aren’t more afraid of these programs,” said Merrick L. Furst, a computer scientist at Georgia Tech. “This is like having a mole in your organization that can do things like send out any information it finds on machines it infects.”
Hot Lick 3 -
Computer security researchers expect that within days or weeks the bot-herder who controls the programs will send out commands to force the botnet to perform some as yet unknown illegal activity.
The Switch Is Final: Now Completely Weaned From Microsoft Internet Explorer
A few weeks ago I declared that I was finally completely fed up with Microsoft. Fed up with the constant security holes, the locking up and crashing of Internet Explorer, and I found out that Microsoft had been hiding the very issue that was plaguing my IE browser.
I switched to Firefox. Click on the graphic above and you can too. All I can say is flawless. Install was easy. I got rid of the shortcut to IE on my desktop and set Firefox as the default browser. All of my bookmarks were intact and I’ve only had to install one or two “add-ons” for my regular browsing habits.
