The article “Web Hoaxes, Counterfeit Sites, and Other Spurious information on the Internet” is about the different types of unreal or partial real websites that exist. The article also talks about how there are various internet sites that exist that are actually counterfeit or hoax sites, but many people assume they are real websites. For example, martinlutherking.org is a counterfeit site and the site is believed to target students searching for information about Dr Martin Luther King Jr for educational purposes. He or she learns from reading the article that a counterfeit site main objective is to provide “disinformation” to someone looking for “legitimate information.” Suspicious sites also known as “hate sites” are another category of misleading websites mentioned in the article and some of them contain things such as a “collection of photographs of lynchings.” The “Kennewick man” (9,300 years old skeleton) websites are controversial as well, because the article talks about these sites and how they try to persuade the audience toward their belief of the skeleton origin. All charity scam sites are made to try to get donations or funding from people in time of sorrow. For example, after September 11, 2001 occurred there were a lot of websites reported as being fake charity sites. The article also brought up the point that most charity organizations are not websites, they are usual physical locations. Lastly, the article mentioned different sites such as SNOPES.com, people could go to and get help to see if a site is real.
In my opinion this article was very informational because it provided information that people do not normally think about. There were several things that sparked questions in mind as I read. One thing that caught me off guard was that not all .org sites are official websites. I thought that only organizations could register their name as the .org, like this was some kind of law or right. Another thing that was shocking to me was to know that news places such as CNN, sometimes does not do a good job of filtering disinformation. When reading the article, I found hilarious the part about people taking some of the health hoax sites as being a real website. The first thing I thought was people need to use more of their common sense and I wonder why these people that got caught in this situation did not stop and think “Is this even logical real?” Or if they felt that the information was real, why did they not consult a doctor about the information? It was intriguing to know that fake websites fell into all kinds of categories. After reading this article, what I learned the most is to check and see who the site is registered to because anyone could register a website. This has also prepared me to be more careful when getting information from a website.
Paul S. Piper “Web Hoaxes, Counterfeit Sites, and Other Spurious information on the Internet”
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
News Report #1
“Downadup virus exposes millions of PCs to hijack”
Barry Nield, CNN.com
1/16/2009
http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/ptech/01/16/virus.downadup/index.html?eref=rss_tech
The article “Downadup virus exposes millions of PCs to hijack” is about a new sleeper virus known as Downadup or Conficker worm, which is rapidly spreading to computers throughout the world as a bug. ‘ “On Tuesday there were 2.5 million, on Wednesday 3.5 million and today [Friday], eight million, “[Mikko Hypponen] told CNN. “It’s getting worse, not better.” ’ F-secure, an anti-virus firm, believe the Downadup worm is coming from a group of people in Ukraine, who are most likely engineers. The Downadup worm spreads by attacking computers that are already infected through Microsoft Windows. Once the worm has come through the infected computer it scans the network looking for other computers to infect. Computers that are vulnerable to this virus are laptops or desktops that have not installed a patch from Microsoft known as MS08-067. At this time the Downadup worm is mainly targeting corporate networks. The purpose of the worm is unknown, but in the future this worm could be a virus that tries to steal personal or financial information.
In my opinion, this virus is very scary for the simple fact that the objective of the worm is unknown. What makes this Downadup worm horrible is that F-secure is having a hard time trying to block out this virus from entering networks period. All it takes is one infected computer to crash thousands of computers. So, imagine having to fix thousands of infected computers, and a single computer amongst them still being infected leaving the network and other computers vulnerable to the worm. The virus has already become a major threat to Europe, the United States, and Asia. Can you visualize almost all the computers in the world crashing and it taking years to try to clean the networks up? The good thing about this is that it is not the first major computer virus of the world, so hopeful they will find some way to take care of this problem, like they have always done with past viruses. What it seems to boil down to is every computer needs to have this Microsoft program (MS08-067) downloaded to it to avoid catching this Downadup worm.
Barry Nield, CNN.com
1/16/2009
http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/ptech/01/16/virus.downadup/index.html?eref=rss_tech
The article “Downadup virus exposes millions of PCs to hijack” is about a new sleeper virus known as Downadup or Conficker worm, which is rapidly spreading to computers throughout the world as a bug. ‘ “On Tuesday there were 2.5 million, on Wednesday 3.5 million and today [Friday], eight million, “[Mikko Hypponen] told CNN. “It’s getting worse, not better.” ’ F-secure, an anti-virus firm, believe the Downadup worm is coming from a group of people in Ukraine, who are most likely engineers. The Downadup worm spreads by attacking computers that are already infected through Microsoft Windows. Once the worm has come through the infected computer it scans the network looking for other computers to infect. Computers that are vulnerable to this virus are laptops or desktops that have not installed a patch from Microsoft known as MS08-067. At this time the Downadup worm is mainly targeting corporate networks. The purpose of the worm is unknown, but in the future this worm could be a virus that tries to steal personal or financial information.
In my opinion, this virus is very scary for the simple fact that the objective of the worm is unknown. What makes this Downadup worm horrible is that F-secure is having a hard time trying to block out this virus from entering networks period. All it takes is one infected computer to crash thousands of computers. So, imagine having to fix thousands of infected computers, and a single computer amongst them still being infected leaving the network and other computers vulnerable to the worm. The virus has already become a major threat to Europe, the United States, and Asia. Can you visualize almost all the computers in the world crashing and it taking years to try to clean the networks up? The good thing about this is that it is not the first major computer virus of the world, so hopeful they will find some way to take care of this problem, like they have always done with past viruses. What it seems to boil down to is every computer needs to have this Microsoft program (MS08-067) downloaded to it to avoid catching this Downadup worm.
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