Internet Blackout on July 9 2012

Apr 25, 2012

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The Internet is the best invention that man has ever created. It works magically in providing us the information we need in a blink of an eye. But this ‘magic’, if exploited by malicious users because of greed for money the Internet itself would seem to turn against us and wrecked its havoc on our digital life. Similar to what happened in 2007; a virus was used to hijack hundreds of thousands of computers by an Estonian crime ring to satisfy their greed. In this post you will learn how to check if you’re infected with a special malware that will cause your computer to experience the Internet Blackout that set to occur on July 9 2012.

The virus called the DNSChanger’ controls the infected machine to click on adverts without the permission and the attention from the user. It also disables the installed antivirus software and causes the Internet connections to slow. And worse, when the user connects to the Internet the virus redirects the entire computer’s request to a malicious server before going to its intended recipient. In effect when these servers are to be brought down, the victims of the DNSChanger virus will be left out of the dark and will not be able to connect to the Internet anymore.

When the FBI took down the crime ring on November last year along with its DNSChanger servers, they set up special DNS servers to handle DNS requests from the infected machine allowing them to continuously communicate to different websites found on the Internet. However on July 9 of this year these special DNS servers was planned to be taken offline because it is costing the Internet Systems Consortium group tens of thousands of dollars to operate each month. So as a solution to the problem, they are reaching out to everyone to check if their computer was infected by the virus.

To check if your computer or laptop is infected, you can visit www.dcwg.org/detect portal. There’s a table that provides a list of sites that will detect your computer for possible infection of the virus. Don’t worry; you don’t have to install anything. If you want to check your computer now you can try visiting www.dns-ok.us and it will immediately inform you if you are infected or not. If it happens that you found out that you are infected with the DNSChanger virus, you can visit www.dcwg.org/fix for the steps on how to remove the virus.

Though the steps presented there sounds to be simple, some experts say that it’s unclear how effective those instructions are. Some also say that to ‘effectively’ remove the virus you will have to wipe your computer’s hard drive and install everything from scratch.

I already visited the site and luckily I found out that I do not belong to the 500,000 PC and Mac computers that are infected by the DNSChanger virus. Have you check your computer already? Do it now before it’s too late.

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July 9 2012 Internet Blackout