Thanks to international
hackers, hundreds of thousands may be without Internet on Monday.
At 12:01 a.m. EDT, the FBI
planned to shut down the Internet servers set up as a temporary safety net to
keep infected computers online for the past eight months. The problem began
when international hackers ran an online advertising scam to take control of
more than 570,000 infected computers around the world. The bureau brought in a
private company to install two clean Internet servers to take over for the
malicious servers so that people would not suddenly lose their Internet.
The FBI arranged for a
private company to run a website -- http://www.dcwg.org -- as a place where
computer users could go to see if their computer was infected and find links to
other computer security business sites where they could find fixes for the
problem.
From the onset, most victims
didn't even know their computers were infected, although the malicious software
probably has slowed their web surfing and disabled their antivirus software,
making their machines more vulnerable to other problems.
Blogs and other Internet
forums are riddled with postings warning of the government using the malware as
a ploy to breach American citizens' computers. "I think the FBI just wants
everyone to go to that website to check our computers so they can check our
computers as well. Just a way to steal data for their own research," one
computer user said in a posting on the Internet.
FBI officials have been
tracking the number of computers they believe still may be infected by the
malware. Worldwide, the total is roughly 250,000 infected. The numbers have
declined steadily, and recent efforts by Internet service providers may limit
the problems on Monday.
Tom Grasso, an FBI
supervisory special agent, said many Internet providers have plans to try to
help their customers. Some may put technical solutions in place that will
correct the server problem. It they do, the Internet will work, but the malware
will remain on victims' computers and could pose future problems.
Other Internet providers are
simply braced for the calls to their help lines.
Read more: http://latino.foxnews.com/latino/news/2012/07/08/click-it-remember-to-check-computer-for-malware/#ixzz206tSDJ00
