[TheForge] o.t. attacks on the internet

[Terry L. Ridder]

hello;

on 25 jan 2003, a coordinated attack was lauched on the internet
which brought good size sections of the internet to a crawl.
given the likelyhood that this is related to war with iraq steps
are being taken to decrease the effectiveness of future attacks.
given the increase in spam flowing out of certain networks a 
series of steps are being put in place to isolate those networks
if certain high water marks are met for spam traffic.
currently my network is only allowing e-mail traffic from the usa,
canada, uk, new zealand, and, australia. all other countries,
commonwealths, etc are being blocked at the routers. other ips and
network providers may be doing the same.

several u.s networks may become blocked if the spam high waters
marks are met. pacbell.net is one of them.

please, turn off network services on your computers which you are
not using. suggestions are smtp, ftp, httpd, rlogin, nfs, telnet.
if you have a hardware firewall or software firewall make sure it
is working correctly.

update your firewall software and virus protection
especially if you are running any microsoft operating systems.

those running macos-8.x/9.x or macos-10.x use the software updater
to update your machine's operating system.

those running linux, net-bsd, gnu hurd, open-bsd, free-bsd, etc, check
your favorite distribution wed site for security alerts.
make sure your intrusion detection software is updated and working
correctly. make sure iptables/ipchains is configured correctly.

remember the machine you save from being hijacked may be your own.

i am wandering off to bed since i have been working on this most
of the day.

-- 
Terry L. Ridder ><>