Your computer may be infected with a virus that will cause it to lose connectivity to the Internet in July.
For computer users, a few mouse clicks could mean the difference between staying online and losing Internet connections this summer.
Unknown to most of them, their problem began when international hackers ran an online advertising scam to take control of infected computers around the world. In a highly unusual response, the FBI set up a safety net months ago using government computers to prevent Internet disruptions for those infected users. But that system is to be shut down.
The FBI is encouraging users to visit a website run by its security partner, http://www.dcwg.org, that will inform them whether they’re infected and explain how to fix the problem. After July 9, infected users won’t be able to connect to the Internet.
Most victims don’t even know their computers have been infected, although the malicious software probably has slowed their web surfing and disabled their antivirus software, making their machines more vulnerable to other problems.
Last November, the FBI and other authorities were preparing to take down a hacker ring that had been running an Internet ad scam on a massive network of infected computers.
“We started to realize that we might have a little bit of a problem on our hands because … if we just pulled the plug on their criminal infrastructure and threw everybody in jail, the victims of this were going to be without Internet service,” said Tom Grasso, an FBI supervisory special agent. “The average user would open up Internet Explorer and get ‘page not found’ and think the Internet is broken.”
So what they did was install a couple of servers to provide correct DNS lookups to the affected computers, but in July those servers will be shut off and anyone relying on them will not be able to surf. You can go to http://www.dcwg.org to check and see if you’re one of the infected ones and get cleaned up if you are.
FBI officials said they organized an unusual system to avoid any appearance of government intrusion into the Internet or private computers. And while this is the first time the FBI used it, it won’t be the last.
“This is the future of what we will be doing,” said Eric Strom, a unit chief in the FBI’s Cyber Division. “Until there is a change in legal system, both inside and outside the United States, to get up to speed with the cyber problem, we will have to go down these paths, trail-blazing if you will, on these types of investigations.”
Now, he said, every time the agency gets near the end of a cyber case, “we get to the point where we say, how are we going to do this, how are we going to clean the system” without creating a bigger mess than before.
Keep an eye on this, because something like it is sure to happen again soon.
PCs only? Or Macs too?
Applies to both. Here’s a link for checking a Mac http://www.dcwg.org/detect/checking-osx-for-infections/
Check the DNS settings on your router as well, as the malware can change those if a weak password was used on the device.
I use the Google DNS servers, rather than the Comcast DNS. Performance is better, and they seem to be more reliable. More information at https://developers.google.com/speed/public-dns/