Trojan Virus Attack

It seems there was a trojan virus that was attacking popular website and exploiting a flaw in the internet explorer web browser. It was using this to download trojans from a web address in Russia. It was reported though that this is no longer a problem since the website in Russia that delivered the actual programs is no longer reachable, so though the javascript that delivers the program is still around it's no longer a threat since the actual trojans can't be reached and downloaded.

Though this may no longer be a threat it was noted in the article that researchers were working with these websites to see how they got compromised in the first place. Microsoft has made no comment about it but they have issued a security alert saying that "Web servers running Windows 2000 Server and IIS that have not applied update 835732 ... are possibly being compromised and being used to attempt to infect users of Internet Explorer with malicious code."

The list of sites that have been infected has not been released to the public but ANS Institute Internet Storm Watch's Handlers' Diary said "the list is long and includes businesses that we presume would normally be keeping their sites fully patched."

The objective of these hackers it seems was financial gain, there is evidence to show that they pilfered passwords from bank emplyees and used to access corporate networks.

This of course wasn't the first time this has happened, it happened back in the fall of 2001 with the Nimda worm, a mass-mailing worm that was easier to detect than the current Internet attack.

So as technology improves so do the ways to beat it, it's always best to keep up with patches and newer versions of programs to help prevent these types of things from happening to us.

For more information check out the article on the cnn website.