After rebooting system in safe mode and reviewing event logs, I found cause of problem. The event log revealed that TCP/IP stack repeatedly exceeded maxim number of connections. I had fell victim to a local machine Denial Of Service attack.

In most cases, an event like this would reveal at least something out of ordinary; A registry entry, file, or service that should not be present. But not in this case.

The computers local drives were imaged to preserve their current state. The images were then submitted to our Anti-Virus and Firewall vendor research teams. As of today, they have not been able to determine exact cause of problem. They do know something malicious is going on, and are looking closely at TCP/IP stack and system process. Short-term investigation points in direction of one of these components being modified or corrupted. It's quite possible that a new vulnerability exists and I'm fairly confident they will be able to pinpoint it.

What's The Point

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I've seen just about every type of exploit, vulnerability, and e-mail attack you can think of over years. Some items we uncover during security assessments would make your jaw drop.

It never ceases to amaze me how many people out there just don't care what kind of problems or damage they cause. It appears as if point of this recent e-mail attack was nothing more than to cause recipient grief, to put target computer out of business for a while. One things for sure, it resulted in a bad day for me. The time I had to put into investigating situation, and preparing images for delivery to our vendor, could have been spent working on something productive.

Conclusion

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Because of this event, we have configured a dedicated system who's sole purpose in life is to test potentially harmful url's. It is actually a virtual machine that if attacked, can be configured to its default state within seconds.

I can only imagine stress and frustration others without technical experience or resources must go through when something like this happens. I receive countless e-mails from our site visitors regarding their concern that they may have been attacked or compromised. I wish I could help them all out directly but that is not always a reality.

What I can do is share my experiences and recommendations. This is one of primary reasons why I enjoy writing articles as much as a do.

How does SEO fit into all of this? The basis of SEO is to get more hits to a particular page or site. At one level it does this by making search engine friendly pages, which is fair enough. But an increasing amount of SEO time and money is being spent on trying to simulate reality, in other words pretending page is an information rich page, while in fact it is a sales page. The SEO does this by second guessing Google’s algorithms and trying to deceive them. Some new clever trick is employed to exploit boundaries of Google’s algorithm.

What happens next? The trick sometimes works for a short period of time. Of course visitor sees page for what it is and hits back button immediately. And Mr Google reacts by changing rules to try to give searcher what they really want. The SEOs will then try a new tactic. Their clients will have to modify all of their pages to conform to what SEO think is new algorithm.

What does all this mean to small business trying to get a presence on web? You can use SEO approach or content based approach. You may have gathered by now that I favour latter.

The SEO approach means that you are constantly trying to outsmart Google. You try to trick Google that your page is what searchers want. Google discovers trick and changes its rules overcome it. The SEOs need to invent a new trick and you need reengineer your site to use it. But Google will soon find you out and change rules again. The dog keeps chasing its tail.

The content based approach avoids all this hassle. You provide information rich pages which is what Mr Google and his searchers want. You join synergy. Google is working for you, not trying to foil your latest trick. Paradoxically SEOs are helping you as well by putting more pressure on Google to get your information rich site in front of more searchers, and more searchers on to your site. As Yahoo and MSN start competing for searchers content based approach will become even more effective.

So give Mr Google what he wants - informative content. He will give you what you want - targeted traffic. A win-win situation.