A Russian newspaper reports that terrorists will paralyzethe internet on August 26th, according to Russian antivirusexperts.

Aleksandr Gostev says he got the information from certainwebsites, but he wouldn’t say which ones. He says they’ll betargeting the U.S. and Western Europe. Yevgeny Kasperskysays similar attacks earlier paralyzed the internet in SouthKorea, and believes it’s “impossible” to stop them, butMikhail Bychinsky, of Dr.Web antivirus labs, says, “I do notbelieve in mass internet attacks because the main serversare defended, and Kaspersky Labs has been foretellingdoomsday for a long time.”

The reason we don’t know what?s going on is because we’reruledby secrecy.

Photo credit: http://www.freeimages.co.uk/

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We get many low cost imports from China, and one of these is computer spam. When internet researchers tracked spam messages, they found that 71% of them come from China.

Gideon Mantel, who tracks e-mail traffic, says most of those messages telling you how to increase your penis size or get a discount mortgage are linked to websites based in China. “We’re talking now about 350,000 to 400,000 unique spam attacks a day,” he says. “Since Jan. 1, we’ve seen probably a 30% to 40% increase” in spam traffic. Each “unique spam attack” goes to at least 50,000 recipients. “The numbers are amazing,” says Mantel. “When we saw them, I was so shocked, we checked and rechecked the numbers three times.”
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About 3.3 million Americans have obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) and John C. Dvorak of PC Magazine thinks they’re the ones spreading most of the computer viruses. He says, “With millions of compulsive people out there getting messages that say things like ‘Open the important attachment!’?you don’t need anything more than that simple demand to propagate a virus. All you need is?a note that says, ‘Open me!’ and millions of poor souls with OCD will open it.”
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We have so many computer viruses and worms today because Microsoft essentially won the lawsuit which accused the company of stifling competition. This means that virtually all PCs use the same Windows operating system and thus share the same vulnerabilities, which can be easily passed on to other computers. Only the minority of Mac users escape. And companies that block spam are giving up because of a “zombie attack” by spammers.
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