| By Anneliese Fox,
on 23-09-2006 15:48
|
You might just notice that I've added a Get Firefox button to the site. There's a reason. While you might already know that we have been avid users of Firefox ourselves and never shy to recommend it to our clients, now I feel more motivated to push the point.
Yesterday, September 22, 2006, the company we buy our hosting from , became "Ground Zero" for a massive injection of malware into pc's everywhere. I say ground zero because the problem does not affect exclusively our servers and is spreading.
So what does this tiny bit of maliciousness do? As someone tries to display a page from your website, they get an additional present downloaded to their computer in the form of a trojan virus.
"Clean my site!" you say, "I can't be giving potential customers computer viruses!"
Ah, if it was only so simple. Your site is clean. It's a server problem (i.e., the computer that delivers your webpages via the internet). And the server's owner (i.e., hosting company) is doing everything in it's power to identify and squash this bug. In fact, by the time you read this, we believe that none of our sites are affected by this particular problem.
So what does this have to do with the get Firefox button? Only web surfers using Internet Explorer (IE) were vulnerable to this attack. If you used any non IE based web browser, the bug never got to your computer. Does using Firefox prevent your computer from being harmed in the future? Of course not. But it does offer a much more secure environment at this time.
If you feel so inclined, it's never a bad time to check that your computer hasn't been infected with a virus. Trend Micro offers a free online virus scan, which I have found very useful. Visit them at: http://www.trendmicro.com/hc_intro/default.asp. You will need to turn off/disable your current antivirus to run. YOU DO have an anti virus I hope !!!
If you don't currently have a anti virus suite. Get one. Go with one of the big names in the business. They may be annoying in several respects, but they do a good job of keeping your computer clean... as long as you do a good job of keeping your software current.
What will we be doing in the future? If we see that a similar type of problem occurs in the future, our first course will be to shut down any affected sites to keep the problem from spreading. When the problem is resolved, we'll restore your site. When possible, we'll try to keep you informed by email.
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