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Hundreds of thousands lose web access
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by liamssoft | July 9, 2012 at 11:02 am
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News Alert For July 9 Doomsday Virus Shutdown For Internet Users
sourced by liamssoft
DNS Changer was a virus run by an Estonian crime ring until authorities and the American FBI broke it up in November. At its peak it infected more than 500,000 PCs and Macs, and at 5.01am UK time today, machines still infected lost all access to the web.
The virus, first used in 2007, hijacked users’ computers without their knowledge to generate fraudulent clicks on adverts. Although its only obvious effects were to slightly slow internet connections and to disable antivirus software, it also redirected computers to the fraudsters’ servers.
Turning that server off immediately would have left users without any web access, so the FBI temporarily replaced it with a site to check whether visiting computers had the virus.
The “DNS Checker Page” allows users to see if they have the virus and to remove it, and has been largely responsible for the fall in the virus’s prevalence.
Now the Bureau has turned off the server because it was costing tens of thousands of dollars to operate each month. It announced earlier in the year that on July 9 it would pull the plug, potentially leaving the 350,000 computers that are still infected, 20,000 of which are in the UK and 85,000 in America, without access to the web.
SOURCE: telegraph.co.uk
Top 10 DNS Changer infections
US - 69,517
Italy - 26,494
India - 21,302
UK - 19,589
Germany - 18,427
France, 10,454
China - 10,304
Spain - 10,213
Canada - 8,924
Australia - 8,518
For more info and free tools to detect and fix the DNS Changer virus
http://www.dcwg.org
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at 12:48 on July 9th, 2012
Now if I wanted to download spyware on millions of Americans' computers, I couldn't think of a better pretext than to warn the public of a threat and then direct them to my "safe" download website... just sayin'...
at 16:47 on July 9th, 2012
Now that's a thought! Here's what the fbi have to say about DNS Malware
at 16:30 on July 9th, 2012
DNSChanger was the work of the Estonian firm Rove Digital; it first appeared on the Internet way back in 2007, but was still spreading as recently as a few months ago. Instead of acting like spyware or scanning users’ computers for sensitive information, DNSChanger changed DNS server entries in infected computers (and, sometimes, detected nearby routers) to point to rogue name servers under the control of the malware authors, rather than the DNS servers provided by an ISP or organization. The result is that whenever a users of an infected system looked up a site on the Internet (say,
www.digitaltrends.comorwww.netflix.com) the request was moderated by Rove Digital’s servers — and that let them inject their own advertising into pages retrieved by infected users. That, in turn, generated income for Rove Digital — at its peak, DNSChanger was estimated to have infected move than 4 million computers around the world, and may have generated as much as $15 million in bogus advertising revenue for Rove Digital.The FBI shutdown means those rogue name servers are now offline. However, any computers or routers that have been impacted by DNSChanger will still try to send lookup requests to them. As of today, they won’t get any answer at all, which means when those computers try to look up www.digitaltrends.com, they won’t get an answer — and they won’t be able to connect to the site.
Source; digitaltrends.com
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R. Eleanor (not verified)at 14:18 on July 10th, 2012
Interesting article!