A few mouse clicks could mean the difference between staying online and losing your Internet connection this summer. A few mouse clicks could mean the difference between staying online and losing your Internet connection this summer.
Hundreds of thousands of people could
lose access to the internet by July following a hackers' scam - and
they don't even know it.
Unknown
to most of them, their problem began when international hackers ran an
online advertising scam to take control of infected computers around the
world.
In a highly unusual response, the FBI
set up a safety net months ago using government computers to prevent
Internet disruptions for those infected users. But that system is to be
shut down.
Most victims don't even know their
computers have been infected, although the malicious software probably
has slowed their web surfing and disabled their antivirus software,
making their machines more vulnerable to other problems.
Last
November, the FBI and other authorities were preparing to take down a
hacker ring that had been running an Internet ad scam on a massive
network of infected computers.
'The average user would open up Internet Explorer and get `page not found' and think the Internet is broken.
They took advantage of vulnerabilities
in the Microsoft Windows operating system to install malicious software
on the victim computers. This turned off antivirus updates and changed
the way the computers reconcile website addresses behind the scenes on
the Internet's domain name system.
The
DNS system is a network of servers that translates a web address - such
as www.ap.org - into the numerical addresses that computers use. Victim
computers were reprogrammed to use rogue DNS servers owned by the
attackers. This allowed the attackers to redirect computers to
fraudulent versions of any website.
The hackers earned profits from advertisements that appeared on websites that victims were tricked into visiting.
The
scam netted the hackers at least $14 million, according to the FBI. It
also made thousands of computers reliant on the rogue servers for their
Internet browsing.
Visit http://www.dns-ok.us/ to find out whether your computer is infected. If you think your computer is infected, visit http://www.dcwg.org/fix/ to learn how to fix the problem.
Vixie said most of the victims are probably individual home users,
rather than corporations that have technology staffs who routinely check
the computers.
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