Hundreds of thousands of Internet uses may lose their online access on July 9, 2012, and Better Business Bureau urges all consumers and businesses to run a quick and easy diagnostic test to see if their computers are infected. The FBI’s DNS Changer Working Group can detect the malware and explain how to fix infected machines.
“Everyone should check to see if their computer is infected,” urged Claire Rosenzweig, President and CEO of the Better Business Bureau Serving Metropolitan New York. “It takes less than a minute to check if your computer is clean, and this should be done by July 9th or you could lose internet access. The DNS Changer Working Group recommends the necessary steps to save your computer.”
Last November, the FBI took down the servers of international hackers operating out of Estonia. The hackers had already successfully downloaded malware onto more than half a million computers, turning off virus updates and redirecting consumers to fraudulent websites. If the servers had simply been shut down, the victims’ computers would no longer be able to access the internet. Instead, the FBI obtained a court order authorizing the Internet Systems Consortium (ISC) to deploy and maintain temporary clean DNS servers to replace the ones that were running the scam, and victims have been redirected to those clean servers ever since, usually without any knowledge they’d been infected in the first place.
The solution is temporary, and was intended originally to be active until March, but it was extended until July 9 to provide additional time for victims to clean affected computers and restore their normal DNS settings. The FBI has stated that the clean DNS servers will be turned off on July 9, 2012, and computers still affected by DNSChanger may lose Internet connectivity at that time.
The FBI believes there are still about 360,000 infected computers in a dozen countries, including the U.S. and Canada.
