Thousands May Lose Net Access On July 9th

When there is a system problem and the internet goes down, there’s a lot of people with itchy trigger fingers calling their cable companies to find out just why the net is not available and when it can be expected back up. It’s partly because we’ve become so dependent upon Internet access that it’s become part of our daily lives.

Across the world, there is the potential of several hundred thousand people that may just lose their Internet access on July 9th which is this coming Monday. The reason behind this is because this is the day that the Federal Bureau of Investigation has decided to bring down their clean servers which they had established to counter the effects of a cyber-criminal gang. This all started back in November 2011 when an Estonian criminal entity was shutdown, but not until after they had managed to infect nearly 4 million computers across the world with malware. Their package was known as “DNS Changer” and essentially, this malware would disable antivirus software as well as redirect users to unauthorized websites.

After making the bust last year, the FBI could have simply shutdown the rogue servers but rather, they elected to replace them with clean ones. Infected users would thus be redirected to a clean server without even knowing about it. This Monday, when the servers are shutdown, computers infected with this malware will no longer have Internet access. By some estimates, there are approximately 350,000 computers that are infected. If you’re worried that you might be affected by this issue, you can take a look at the DNS Changer Working Group website located at dcwg.org for further information on removing the malware.

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