"STARS AND STRIPES" WEB SITE HACKED

The Stars and Stripes Web site appears to have been struck by a hacker early Saturday.

Stars and Stripes is the newspaper which has been around for decades and reports on the latest happenings in the United States military.

http://www.stripes.com/

Indications are that this may have been related to an automated cyber-attack launched last month that compromised more than 10,000 web pages, including everyday destinations such as travel, government and hobby sites. Such attacks typically plant a piece of Javascript code that diverts users to a site in China, where malicious software ("malware") tries to break into the user's computer.

Security experts have noticed a recent trend in which hackers target individual computers rather than better-protected networks. The problem on the Stripes site has been resolved. Users who tried to visit the site between midnight and 9 a.m. on Saturday Eastern time, or experienced any difficulties accessing stripes.com in the past couple of days, are encouraged to update and run their anti-virus scan programs.

More information about malware can be found at such sites as http://www.clamwin.com/ and http://www.malwarehelp.org/, or at the sites of such security companies as McAfee and Symantec.