Good Guys 1 :: Bad Guys 2,336,542

Recently my credit card was stolen. My wife refused to call the bank because she said the thief was spending less money than I was!

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Botnets are networks of virus-infected computers controlled remotely by an attacker. The Coreflood virus is a key-logging program that allows cyber thieves to steal personal and financial information by recording unsuspecting users’ every keystroke.

Botnet Operation Disabled
FBI Seizes Servers to Stop Cyber Fraud

Last week United States Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, released an announcement stating; they had taken down the CoreFlood bot-net. On the face of this announcement it sounds like good news. Federal indictments issued, server hardware confiscated and Internet domain names seized!

Fundamentally this is good news. However, the spot that has been known and functioning for 10 years now! My question; what took so long? This particular bot net was responsible for losses estimated in the millions of dollars. To read the complete report posted by the Federal Bureau of investigation see this link 

On that website are instructions for you to follow to find out if you are part of the 2,336,542 computers were infected. And what you should do to prevent becoming part of a bot net in the future. Be safe online there are bad guys out there. And they don't care if you get hurt!

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California state law that requires everybody who does business with citizens of my state, must notify us at any time may experience some form of computer intrusion that exposes our personal information in an unencrypted format. Recently I received two e-mails from companies reporting just such an incident. One from Disney Destinations, and the other from Brookstone.com.

Neither of these company's experienced an intrusion. They both use an outside company to send their e-mails. And that Corporation Epsilon, was hacked! Both companies informed me that the only personal information of mine that had been exposed was my name, and my e-mail address. And that I may experience a new influx of spam e-mail. They further warned me to ignore all e-mails from unknown origin. And to delete hemwithout opening them (thus avoiding a possible bot net virus infection).

Since then my junk mail folder has been filling up faster than usual. And for those of you, not fortunate enough to live under the protection of California State Law, I am pssing this information along for your consideration.