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Hundreds of thousands may lose Internet in July


aronoiiel

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Not to sound like a paranoid nut or anything...

But this does seem a bit 'off'.

Maybe it has something to do with reading a story about a college kid in Miami facing 20 years of jail time for facebook posts.

Yes that ought to be it. Realistically if I'm THAT worried about my computer being infected I'm more apt to back up the files I want to save (mostly pics), and then reformat

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No, it's true. I'll try to explain the how and why to those not familiar with the IT as best as possible so bear with me please :P

As you may now, there are many different kind of viruses, one of the type of virus are the ones who try to contact a central (command and control) server to get instructions about their next task. If your computer is infected with such kind of virus, it's now part of a so called 'botnet' and your entire computer can now be controlled by someone else. What the FBI did (a very long time ago) is took over these command and control servers so no new command could be sent to the infected computers. But why would you lose your internet access because of that?

Well, you won't "really" lose your internet access, simply one of the (important) layers on top of it. Every address you type in your webbrowser like husky-owners, google.com and facebook.com HAVE to me converted to an address the computer understands. This is called the IP address. This converting is done for you using another public server on the internet, the DNS server. Which server that is is stored on your computer. What this botnet did was CHANGING these settings to use THEIR custom DNS server. The idea behind is that they could see and actually change which websites you where visiting. They injected advertisements in pages you visited which made them basically rich in no time. The FBI took over this DNS server too and decided to keep it running for a bit to let users fix their computer. They have decided to finally take it offline in 9th July. Without DNS you can't simply type in husky-owners.com as suddenly your computer has no idea how to convert it to an IP address, hence you'll get the message husky-owners.com does not exist or is not reachable, appearing like you have no internet access any more.

The site (http://www.dcwg.org/) apparently has a way to detect if you're victim to this and an explanation how to fix it but the site's currently offline. But I'll be honest, if your computer is indeed infected it's probably better to do a complete reinstall anyway as you will probably have all kinds of other malware too by now.

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