OT: virus on the wild?

[Graham Todd]

On Sat, 24 Jan 2009 02:49:40 -0500
Charly Avital <shavital at mac.com> wrote:

> >   Bingo! I found it...
> > http://www.technipages.com/disable-the-firefox-prefetch-setting.html  
> 
> Great, thank you!
[snipped]

When you get a URL such as this (or an IP number), add them at the
bottom of yours hosts file in /etc/hosts and have the IP referencer as
127.0.0.1

Computers don't actually look up URLs as such, they route them through
DNS servers who gives the computer the IP number and then it connects
with that.  The hosts file cuts this down by making your computer
connect with the IP number listed in the hosts file for a given URL.

By convention, the IP address which your computer recognises as itself
is 127.0.0.1, and if this were listed in /etc/hosts as the reference
for a "bad" URL, in trying to connect to the URL, your computer would
simply be trying to connect with itself - which kills the attempt to
connect.

A good hosts file is a good second line of defence and you can get one
at :

http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm

The webpage explains it all.  Add it to the bottom of the
exist /etc/hosts file and comment out (put # at the begining) the line
in which the mvps.org file says:

127.0.0.1		localhost

Also for a double line of protection, use a filtering proxy such as
privoxy.

-- 
Graham Todd