The latest scare sweeping the internet is the Doomsday knell for July 9th. Why, you may ask? It is because that is the date the FBI and the American government will switch off DNS servers, cutting access to the internet for an estimated 350,000 computers.
And yours could be one of them.
Since 2007, a trojan virus created by a ring of Estonian hackers has been running amok on the internet, infecting hundreds of thousands of computers, and earning the hackers a pretty penny indeed.
The purpose of the trojan was to redirect the victims’ browsers away from the sites they wanted to visit to webpages owned by the Estonians. The advertisements present on their webpages earned the hackers millions of dollars in revenues as redirected traffic was exposed to them.
In November 2011 the FBI arrested the six Estonian hackers responsible for creating the trojan virus that infected 500,000 computers. It was discovered that an estimated 350,000 computers were still running on those DNS servers.
Surrogate servers were put in place to support those 350,000 computers, with U.S. taxpayers footing the bill. But on July 9th the servers will be turned off, and any computers still running on the DNS servers will be cut off from the internet.
Luckily, there is still time to ensure you don’t own one of those infected computers.
Click here to check if your computer’s DNS server has changed.
Click here to report any changes to the FBI.
This wasn’t the first scam to hit the internet, and it won’t be the last. Protect yourself by keeping your antivirus software up-to-date, running regular scans, and never ever clicking on anything that looks even remotely suspicious.
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