Viri, Worms, Spyware

Tue May 25 16:52:50 GMT 2004 Viri, Worms, Spyware

I had an incident this week where a proxy server (SME server) was brought to its knees by an excessively high amount of browsing activity. I don't know yet whether this is a virus, a worm, or some particularly screwed up spyware, but by using my Squid log analyzer we were able to see that three machines on the lan were generating an incredible amount of traffic. Interestingly, none of these machines were actually in use; all were sitting at Windows domain login, yet each was making over 1500 web accesses per hour - almost 1 every other second.

For the moment, I just had him power these boxes off. Later on they'll be isolated from the network and examined for problems. My hope is that these are just boxes that somehow missed getting virus/Microsoft updates (the company is generally pretty good about keeping on top of these things) and that whatever we have there hasn't spread to other machines.

It's not a bad idea at all to run a proxy server, and eamining the logs now and then can warn you of developing problems.

Unix and Linux Support

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