Legit News
FBI Says Over 300,000 Computers May Be Unable To Access The Internet
According to the FBI, on Monday July 9th over 300,000 computers will no longer be able to access the internet due to a malware infection known as "DNS Changer Trojan". The internet outage for these computers is due to the FBI shutting down the ring of cyber-criminals responsible for creating the Trojan late last year. A simple shutdown of the DNS servers the cyber-criminals were using to redirect users to compromised sites or ads would have caused millions of users to lose internet access. The FBI originally had a court order to keep the servers online until they could fix the problem, however time has run out and these servers will now be shut down on Monday. Considering the DNS Changer Trojan was typically installed via drive by download on websites that appeared innocent, a user could be compromised and not know it. It is advised that users should check if they are infected using the online scanner that can be found at the FBI-run DNS-OK.US site. The easiest fix for the problem is to just use Malwarebytes Anti-Malware which can be downloaded for free from here. After downloading and installing, users can run Malwarebytes which will then automatically inspect the system's DNS settings on a user's machine and should it be infected, will remove the malicious DNS servers from the computer's registry. After this, the computer will obtain the correct DNS addresses from the user's ISP. So take the extra step and make sure your computer won't be affected by the outage, it might just save you a hassle on Monday.
DNS servers essentially instruct a system on how to navigate through the internet. The DNS Servers basically act as an interpreter in a foreign land, helping a visitor that doesn’t speak the local language to be able to communicate with the locals and figure out where to go for food, lodging, etc. When these servers shut down on Monday, this interpreter will be gone and these computers will have no way to communicate with the locals, so, if you were the visitor, you would be stuck and unable to continue your travels.
Posted by | Sat, Jul 07, 2012 - 04:26 PM
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