[TheForge] [OT] Re: Cant access yahoo or hotmail mail

[Mike]

> My provider e-mail through Cox seems to be working. But I can't
> access my hotmail or yahoo e mail accounts.

I saw some passing remark about an outage on hotmail.  Nothing about yahoo.

> Is there a cyber attack hitting the networks?

There *is* a new trojan going around.  Phatbot is a variant of an
earlier trojan.  It allows the bad guys to use your Windows computer
for DOS attacks, spamming and other nasties.  I gather from
superficial reading [1] that it attempts to propagate itself by
hitting on back doors and vulnerabilities installed by other malware.

As I write, I see 24.159.120.123 (a charter.net DSL box) hitting on my
humble dialup connection, trying 5 different known backdoor ports.

Depending on how successful this critter proves to be, how rapidly it
propagates, it may cause some disruption.  (I think it only got going a
day or two ago.)  But I'd guess it isn't the source of your problem
with hotmail or yahoo.

[1] See: http://www.lurhq.com/phatbot.html for technical details

- Mike

-- 
Michael Spencer                  Nova Scotia, Canada       .~. 
                                                           /V\ 
mspencer@tallships.ca                                     /( )\
http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/                        ^^-^^

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