POSTED: 9:36 am EDT June 25, 2004 Government and industry experts are reporting a mysterious, large-scale Internet attack against thousands of popular Web sites.
The virus-like infection tries to implant hacker software onto the computers of all Web site visitors.
Industry experts and the Homeland Security Department are studying the infection to determine how it spreads across Web sites and find adequate defenses against it. A government warning says even Web sites trusted by users may contain the potentially malicious code.
The infection appears to target at least one recent version of Microsoft's Internet Information Server, which is popular among businesses and organizations. The United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team says the problem adds a piece of JavaScript to the bottom of Web pages that accesses another server.
US-CERT says disabling JavaScript will prevent this activity from affecting a user's system, but it could make some sites that use JavaScript appear incorrectly. The attack's effects are said to be unusually broad, but are not substantially interfering with Internet traffic.
United States Homeland Security officials were notified after an exploding vending machine turned the coolant freon into phosgene, a poisonous gas used as a chemical weapon in World War I.
The explosion forced the evacuation of 10 people from a Texas hospital......
Ms Ross said state Homeland Security officials had to be notified of the incident because of phosphene's possible use as a chemical weapon.....
Every day it's something new with this computer virus stuff. Makes one afraid to go surfing the net these days.
That javascript stuff is sometimes a problem for my computer, but there is one site I visit that I need it for, so can't disable it.
One of regular mailers re: illegals sent me over 100 mails on it, she definitely caught some spamming virus!