Malware unleashed on Monday?

SteveLord · July 2012

Malware may knock thousands off Internet on Monday - Yahoo! News

Someone called me and asked me about this today. I do not recall hearing anything about this and couldn't find it referenced in here or any of my tech sites.

The FBI has a site setup to scan your computer for it. Part of me would rather take my chances with the malware though.

Roguetadhg · July 2012

If something happens, I'll just nuke it and pave over.

Slowhand · July 2012

This has been popping up in the news over the last few months. It's an attempt to snuff out a piece of malware that was floating around for a long time that pointed infected machines to a particular set of DNS servers. The FBI took control of the spoofed servers and are going to be shutting them down. Anyone still infected by that malware will no longer be able to find those servers and will have to clean up their machines before being able to access the Internet again.

Basically, expect a call from your Comet-Cursor-loving grandma on Monday in a panic, wondering why her computer isn't working.

Roguetadhg · July 2012

Hah. Mouse tails!

I remember sitting around watching my computer get dragged mercilessly to the ground with the tail.

MentholMoose · July 2012

The malware was DNSChanger and as the name implies, it configured infected PCs to use DNS servers controlled by the malware authors. Last year they got busted by the FBI who replaced the DNS servers with good ones, so name resolution would continue to work on infected PCs. So now the problem is the FBI needs to shut down those servers, and a lot of people haven't fixed their PC yet. It is an interesting situation.

F-Secure has an article and poll:
Should the FBI be reauthorized to continue DNSChanger servers? - F-Secure Weblog : News from the Lab

paulgswanson · July 2012

I love how their answer is when you go to select sites(that agreed to help fix it) it says:
"You are infected Click here to fix"
Isn't that how most of them got screwed up in the first place?

JDMurray · July 2012

Google has been working to identify the misconfigured hosts to their owners. I haven't seen any updated stats on how many machines are still hitting those DNS addresses. I'll guess that 99.9% of the remaining hosts are home-based client systems and not critical servers.

DNSChanger: Zlob trojan - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

DNSChanger victims to lose internet on Monday - The H Security: News and Features