Today a number of people online are getting their systems rebooted for no reason. The first thing they see is this dialog box:



Scores of people called in tech support where I work today describing this problem. It also hit my kids system and I notice many topics in other boards describing this.

It appears to be some attack. There is no coincidence that this is starting to flare up today.

If you are getting this dialog box and rebooting, it is important to install this patch from Microsoft (if you're on XP)

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details...&displaylang=en

As a test, I logged on my kids machine and connected to the Internet. Within 1 minute, it shut down. Then I logged in and did not connect. No reboot. Since the patch was installed on my kids system, no reboots have occured in the past hour.

I know, I shouldn't post this in the NEWS section, but it's a warning to those who ae working on their site and should know why their system constantly reboots today.

- Jim

Ok the news are decent enough to stay here. The problem is caused by RPC worm that scans for windows boxes and attacks port 135. After installing a patch I recommend you to run fresh antivirus software to be sure that your box is not atacking other boxes on the net because it was alredy infected.


Our linux servers are not affected with this worm

Doing a little more research on this, you my also want to check to see if you have a file called MSBLAST.EXE on your hard drive and a registry entry for it. This is part of the worm that will be useless once you install the patch. Also run a good virus scan and you may want to install a good firewall such as ZoneAlarm.


Heres more information regarding this latest worm:

http:// isc.sans.org/diary.html?date=2003-08-11

(cut and past URL)

Regardless of whether or not you were affected by this, you will want to install this patch from Microsoft just the same. The worm is passed from system to system and scans the web for the open port, which explains why so many systems rebooted yesterday. If you haven't been effected, it may be in a future date in time. The patch will fix this problem.

EDIT: Serge already hit the same points I made.

Or, just install Linux.

Resources:

There is an excellent online virus scan site available from Trend Micro that lets you do a virus scan online for free:

http://housecall.trendmicro.com/

Zone Labs ZoneAlarm firewall software can be downloaded for free here:

http://www.zonelabs.com/store/content/comp...reeDownload.jsp