Disinfect Your Connectivity Virus with This Fix

Disinfect Your Connectivity Virus with This Fix

Apr 3, 2009

This morning we received a couple of calls and IMs about a lack of connectivity to our site and through Trade-Ideas PRO.  This was the first time something like this has happened in over 3 years, so it got our attention.

It turns out it has nothing to do with Trade-Ideas, thankfully.
A Plot Right Out of a James Bond Film
There are 2 explanations for some of the connection problems:
The first comes from Norton, the Antivirus people:

The C.o.n.f.i.c.k.e.r worm, sometimes called Do.wn.an.dup or Ki.do, managed to infect a large number of computers. Specifics are hard to come by, but some researchers estimate that millions of computers have been infected with this threat since January. Current users of Symantec’s Norton security products are protected. Users who lack protection are invited to download a trial version of Norton AntiVirus 2009, Norton Internet Security 2009 or Norton 360 Version 3.0. If you are unable to reach our web site, you may be infected. In that case you will need to get to a computer that is not infected, download our specialized Conficker removal tool and run it on the infected machine before installing new antivirus software. 

Nice. (If I were the paranoid and cynical type (or if we were in a James Bond movie) this would be a doozy of a marketing tactic:  Create the disease, make a mint on the cure.) Crazy Russian kids?
A second explanation comes from some research one of the heads at Trade-Ideas did in getting answers from Registry.com folks.  He thinks that there might have been an error on their part in 1 or more DNS servers that resolves IP addresses and names while managing internet traffic. Perhaps for the same reasons as above.  This is spectulation for now.
Our Chief Technical Officer explained to me thusly:

“Our store is open, but there’s a bad wreck on the freeway, so a lot of people can’t get to us.  Our servers are fine, but some people experience difficulty reaching Trade-Ideas.  If someone has a problem, please ask them to install the file below.”

Do You Have A Problem Connecting to Trade-Ideas?

Here is the file to download and install: 
Leave a comment if you have any questions or want to share any experiences.