Showing posts with label News. Show all posts
Showing posts with label News. Show all posts
250000 computers may lose internet
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| About a quarter-million computers around the world risk losing internet access on Monday due to a malicious software that is part of a hacking scam shut down by US authorities. |
BOSTON: About a quarter-million
computer users around the world are at risk of losing internet access on Monday
because of malicious software at the heart of a hacking scam that US
authorities shut down last November.
Some blogs and news reports hyped the
risk of an outage, warning of a potential 'blackout' and describing the
Alureon malware as the
'Internet Doomsday' virus.
Yet experts said only a tiny fraction
of computer users were at risk, and internet providers would be on call to
quickly restore service. They said they considered the threat to be small
compared with more-prevalent viruses such as Zeus and SpyEye, which infect
millions of PCs and are used to commit financial fraud.
As of this week, about 245,000
computers worldwide were still infected by Alureon and its brethren, according
to security firm Deteque. That included 45,355 computers in the United States.
The viruses were designed to redirect
internet traffic through rogue DNS servers controlled by criminals, according
to the FBI. DNS servers are
computer switchboards that direct web traffic.
When authorities took down the rogue
servers, a federal judge in New York ordered
that temporary servers be kept in place while the victims' machines were
repaired. The temporary servers will shut down at 12:01 am EDT (0401 GMT) on
Monday, which means the infected PCs that have not been fixed will no longer be
able to connect to the internet.
Some US internet providers, including
AT&T and Time Warner Cable, have made temporary arrangements so that their customers
will be able to access the internet using the address of the rogue DNS servers.
"It's a very easy one to
fix," said Gunter Ollmann, vice president of research for security company
Damballa. "There are plenty of tools available."
Many of the machines that remain
infected are probably not in active use since most victims were notified of the
problem, said security expert Johannes Ullrich, who runs the Internet Storm
Center, which monitors web threats.
The United States has charged seven people for orchestrating
the worldwide internet fraud. Six were arrested in Estonia, while the seventh, who was living in Russia, is still at large. Tallinn has so far extradited
two of the men to New York where they appeared in Manhattan federal court.
The case is USA v. Tsastsin et al, US
District Court for the Southern District of New York, No. 11-cr-878.
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Higgs boson
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| One possible signature of a Higgs boson from a simulated proton–proton collision. It decays almost immediately into two jets of hadrons and two electrons, visible as lines. |
The Higgs boson or Higgs particle is a proposed elementary particle in the Standard Model of particle physics. The Higgs boson is named afterPeter Higgs, who along with others, proposed the theoretical model that predicted such a particle in 1964.The name "boson" is derived from the surname of the Indian physicist, Satyendra Nath Bose, a contemporary of the German physicist Albert Einstein. Bosons stands for one of the two fundamental classes of subatomic particles, characterized by Bose–Einstein statistics and all have integer spins. The existence of the Higgs boson and the associated Higgs field explain why the other elementary particles in the standard model have mass. In this theory, the Higgs field has a non-zero field everywhere, even in its lowest energy state. Other elementary particles obtain an effective mass through the continuous interaction with this field. The Higgs field interaction is the simplest mechanism which explains why elementary particles have mass. The Higgs boson—the smallest possible excitation of the Higgs field—has been the target of a long search in particle physics. One of the primary design goals of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland—one of the most complicated scientific instruments ever built— was to test the existence of the Higgs boson and measure its properties.
Because of its role in a fundamental property of elementary particles, the Higgs boson has been referred to as the God particle in popular culture, although many scientists regard this as a hyperbole. According to the Standard Model, the Higgs boson is a boson, a type of particle that allows multiple particles to exist in the same state. Furthermore, the model posits that the particle has no intrinsic spin, no electric charge, and no colour charge. It is also very unstable, decaying almost immediately after its creation.
On July 4, 2012, the CMS and the ATLAS experimental collaborations at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN announced that they observed a new particle that is consistent with the Higgs boson, noting that further data and analysis were needed before the particle could be positively identified.
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