Ok... maybe I'm not as paranoid as I thought...
From Curly Bear on EB...
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Happy Thanksgiving, Ryan!
Early in the morning on November 21 I was watching
Netflix (via my AT&T internet connection). All of the
sudden Netflix went haywire. I looked at my DSL modem
and all the green lights were wither blinking or going
off. I turned off the tube and went to bed (btw both my
computers were off).
On the following day I turned on my computer and found
that a virus had locked me out of most of its
functions. I hopped onto my wife's computer and found
it was heavily infected with malware. Over the next 5
days, whenever I'd reboot I'd get reinfected by another
slew of viruses. I ran and reran virus/malware scans
and began to make some progress to restoring both
computers. I finally got back on the net and went to
http://www.outageanalyzer.com/ to find out what
happened.
They had a report posted that on Nov. 21st there was an
internet outage on the west coast and that 188 servers
were down (that's a LOT of servers!). I speculated that
AT&T's servers also went down and somehow during this
process (or before or after, dunno) a whole slew of
viruses etc made it past AT&T's compromised firewalls
and onto user's computers. I checked with AT&T and
those !@#$%^& informed me that my DSL modem was the
only model that doesn't have a firewall built into it
(thanks for nothing...grumble...!).
I finally got my computers back up and running and
fully protected. During this process I went back to
http://www.outageanalyzer.com/ to get further details
on this particular outage. And guess what? There is no
longer any record of this outage that I could find.
IMHO it took something major to knock out those 188
servers. Stuxnet worm? National security hush-hush?
Who knows. Just wanted to let you know.
~Peace~