You should check your computer

[huntingdan]

Well undoubtly making big news today. Here is a story posted by Fox News and starting to hit other news outlets. Not sure who was the first to break, but I don't really care. Some people may have been infected by this, easy way to check and make sure by a link provided in the story. Doesn't scan your computer or download anything. Just reads your IP address to make sure it is going to the correct place.

Anyways, it was sent by the local university hospital here for their students to make sure that they weren't infected to keep records of employees and students confidential.

On a side note, if infected your internet could possibly shut down in July when the clean servers are shut down. I usually don't bite on a lot of this stuff but after reading and a simple check, I thought it would be beneficial just to make sure. Not a computer engineer by any means, if you are and think this is BS please say so, I will not be offended. Just kind of caught me off guard that the IT departments of a big university hospital would send this out without any credibility.

If it happens and you are shut down, could mean no B&B starting in July.


Edit: Saw it was also reported by USA Today among other computer sites.
Here is the link to the news report. http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2012/...ernet-in-july/

[eth]

Has this been a well covered story in the US, or is this the first report? If the plan was to run them until March, why haven't anyone heard about this? And why do FBI take it upon themselves to service half a million computers needs, instead of redirecting them automatically to a website that explains what they need to do? If the story as it is written is true, that would have been perfectly possible. And if they want people to fix the problem on their end, the only way to do that is to redirect all requests to a site telling you what to do. Meaning they would not be able to surf their usual sites until they cleaned things up. I've worked in ISP customer service, and trust me, the average user will not fix his problem until the connection is permanently lost. Only geeks call in about low bandwith/speed and stability issues.

The technicalities in the article are perfectly possible (using a vulnerability to take control of the computer, and set it to use an "evil" DNS server), but the poor problem solving leads me to believe the story is not representing the actual situation, or it is simply a hoax.

ð

[ouch]

Here's a quicker fix:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHg5SJYRHA0

[Bigsurprise]

Here's a quicker fix:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHg5SJYRHA0

Burn

[Doc4]

Here's a quicker fix:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHg5SJYRHA0

Dag nab it! I had money on 'chocolate rain' ...

[Dalejr]

I thought it was a joke but I guess not, no intenet will suck... On second thought no it won't, we need a virus to rid the world of cell phones too.

[scottish steve]

Is this only in America?

[dpmtherrien]

Not sure, but I think there would have been news of this reported all over, and often.

[Seraphim]

Not sure, but I think there would have been news of this reported all over, and often.

Just sayin' -

Here is a story posted by Fox News....

[Intrigued]

Is this only in America?

Here is a quote from the article:

The number of victims is hard to pinpoint, but the FBI believes that on the day of the arrests, at least 568,000 unique Internet addresses were using the rogue servers. Five months later, FBI estimates that the number is down to at least 360,000. The U.S. has the most, about 85,000, federal authorities said. Other countries with more than 20,000 each include Italy, India, England and Germany. Smaller numbers are online in Spain, France, Canada, China and Mexico.
Vixie said most of the victims are probably individual home users, rather than corporations that have technology staffs who routinely check the computers.


* edit: This quote is from the NPR article which is the same as the Fox New, Daily Mail, NBC, CBS, ABC, ect... reporting, which all used the same AP story.

Not sure, but I think there would have been news of this reported all over, and often.

I googled to see how much it was reported and found that it was very widely reported by various news outlets, but all of them seemed to be reporting the exact same AP (Associated Press) article. Most published or reported on it 2-4 days ago. I didn't find any mention of it before the AP story hit.

[Edcculus]

I didn't get a chance to read this article, but this problem has been pretty widely known in tech circles since at least Januaury, if not before. I've seen various articles (even the more tech oriented ones) that are trying to get clicks by fear mongering that the FBI is shutting off the internet. Not true.


The dumbed down version of what this Trojan does is changes your Domain Name Server (DNS) to route you through bogus servers. On July 9, the FBI will shut down those servers. Therefore, if your computer is infected, or has its DNS changed, you will get internet errors because the server it is trying to use to resolve web addresses is offline.


If you are on Windows, I think most antivirus suites, and even Windows Defender check for this now.


You can also visit. http://dns-ok.us/ if you are in the US. Also, this article (from February) has links to instructions on how to manually check and change your DNS on various systems.

Here is a link to the most recent Gizmodo article on the subject. http://gizmodo.com/dnschanger/

There are various DNS's out there. I just set mine to 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 (google's open DNS). That way, if it gets changed, I know there is a problem.