Access to /etc/network blocked

[H.M. Gladney]

Access to the "/etc/network" directory is being denied to a Konqueror
execution.  In order to test whether this was because some other application
held exclusive access, I killed all applications except Konqueror, rebooted
and obtained the same result.
 
Subsequent checks in a terminal session revealed: 

>From "ls -l /etc"
drwxrwxr--  6 root   root      4096 2007-04-16 22:19 network

>From "ls -l /etc/network"
-rwxrwxrwx 1 root root  230 2007-05-08 07:50 interfaces

What's happening, and what can/should I do now? 

Best wishes, Henry