Welcome to FlyerTalk. No, I would not suggest shutting down FT for the day just because of this.

The ping attacks that were mentioned are fairly old, and almost all newer versions of Windows, Unix, etc are immune to this. However, if you are running a version of Windows which is old enough to have the ping vulnerability, you have plenty of other problems to worry about - ones that can do much more damage than the "ping of death" attack.

Another note is that by visiting FT you are no more likely than when you aren't visiting FT to have someone send you pings. I can easily start pinging random computers... just because you visit FT there is no reason why you would be targeted over another random computer on the internet.

My suggestion: Keep your computer patched (by visiting http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com for Windows computers) and don't worry this.

If you still have concerns, post in the "technical issues" forum and someone can explain it more fully.