Critical Security Alert!

If you have not updated your anti-virus signature files in the last day or two, you may find yourself part of the recent North Korean attacks on computers at the US State Department, and the Secret Service.

If you do not have any anti-virus on your computer, your computer may well be one of the thousands that have already been taken over by the North Korean attackers, and used to commit the attacks on the US government sites.

According to the South Korean security firm Anhlab, and quoted by ABC News, "Leading South Korean web security firm Ahnlab, which has closely examined the attacks, said the new phase would target data on tens of thousands of infected personal computers.

"'The affected computers will not be able to boot and their storage files will be disabled,' said Lee Byung-cheol of Ahnlab."

This is the way it is occuring in South Korea, and will soon begin occurring in the US, according to this from the website PC Advisor:

"The owners of tens of thousands of bot-infested PCs in South Korea who've resisted calls all week to update or install antivirus software will today find their PCs wiped of data, said computer security specialist AhnLab.

"From midnight local time (3pm yesterday here) the virus, which has been attacking prominent US and South Korean government and commercial websites all week, has been programmed to encrypt user data or reformat the hard drive of the PC.

"There are still ways to save an infected PC, although if the owners have ignored security requests so far they might be unlikely to follow AhnLab's recommendations. These involve starting Windows in safe-mode by using the boot menu accessed through the F8 key at start-up, setting the clock to before July 10 and then rebooting the PC normally and updating antivirus software or performing a free scan to erase the virus."

Here is what happened in the US so far:

"The US government has been the victim of a cyber attack of unusual veracity.

"A botnet comprised of about 50,000 infected computers has been waging a war against US government websites and causing headaches for businesses in the US and South Korea.

The attack started Saturday, and security experts have credited it with knocking the US Federal Trade Commission's (FTC's) website offline for parts of Monday and Tuesday. Several other government websites have also been targeted, including the US Department of Transportation (DOT).

"The DOT has been experiencing network incidents since this past weekend. We are working with the US Computer Emergency Readiness Team [US-CERT] at this time," a DOT spokeswoman said Tuesday.

"A spokeswoman for the US Department of the Treasury confirmed that the Treasury's website had been hit with a denial-of-service attack. "We're working with our service provider to mitigate the impact," she said.

"A spokeswoman for the FTC could not say what caused the outage at that agency's website, and the US-CERT did not return calls seeking comment.

"Other targets have included banking websites in Korea, US Bancorp, the US Secret Service, the US Department of Homeland Security, the US Department of State, the White House, the US Department of Defense, the New York Stock Exchange, the Nasdaq and the Washington Post, according to security researchers studying the incident."

CyberSmart Computers & Networking recommends:

1) If you do not have an anti-virus program, you are part of the problem.  It is highly irresponsible to run a computer on the Internet without this software. Do humanity a favor and get the software installed on your computer.

2) If you do have antivirus software installed, then update the signatures and run a full system scan to be sure you are not infected.

3) If you are a CyberSmart client, and have the CyberSmart version of Norton Internet Security 2009 installed by CyberSmart - relax! You are covered by our 1-year warranty against infections. Make sure the subscription is not expired, then run a full-system scan. Backup all of your data TODAY to ensure you will be safe.

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