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The Internet may Disappear for Thousands in July because of Malware

The FBI is telling everyone now that unless they take precautions against a particular malware issue they will be Webless come July 8th.

A particularly nasty malware by the name of DNSChanger was discovered in early 2007 and still infects millions of computers that have users that are completely oblivious to the fact that they have an issue going on. The infection isn’t like other malware and viruses that spam your desktop with ads or turn a webpage into a living advertisement for a company and it’s hard to detect the existence unless a proper malware discovery program is installed and used to disinfect a computer.

Basically, the DNSChanger changes the numerical Internet Protocol (if you access a router using the IP address at home when you set up your wireless network, you’ll know what this is). Instead of reaching the IP you’d like to reach and then being directed to the proper address, DNSChanger fiddles with an infected machine’s settings and directs the user to rogue servers set up by a criminal that can hand out whatever addresses it wishes to hand out.

In an FBI Press Release handed out late last year, a US attorney stated that these hackers “were international cyberbandits who hijacked millions of computers at will and rerouted them to Internet Web sites and advertisements of their own choosing — collecting millions in undeserved commissions for all the hijacked computer clicks and Internet ads they fraudulently engineered.”

The FBI has successfully disrupted the ring and seized many of the rogue servers however, but since there were millions of computers that are currently depending on them to reach the internet, the agency opted to convert them into legitimate DNS machines instead at an incredible cost the government. This is to give people time to legitimately find connections to the internet instead, but the servers will be turned off come July. If you’d like to know if your computer or network is infected by this virus, head on over to https://www.dcwg.org/detect/ to run a quick scan to see if your computer is infected and to fix it for free.

Avoiding scams like this when millions have not can be incredibly difficult, but that’s why it’s important to safeguard you, your information, and your client’s information from the inevitable tricks people play on the Internet. Make sure you have a proper service to protect you day and night so you never have to be caught accidentally hurting your computer system.

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