Unbeknownst to most, hundreds of thousands of people could lose access to the internet this summer.
According to an article in the Daily Mail, the FBI has warned that internet users worldwide may lose access to the web in July after a massive hackers' advertising scam took control of a network of more than 570,000 computers. After July 9, infected users won't be able to connect to the Internet.
The FBI is encouraging computer users to visit www.dcwg.org, a website run by its security partner that contains information to see if your computer is infected. The website also offers a guide on how to fix the problem.
In November last year the FBI began to take down a hacker ring that had been running an Internet ad scam on a massive network of infected computers.
Tom Grasso, an FBI supervisory special agent, said: "We started to realize that we might have a little bit of a problem on our hands because … if we just pulled the plug on their criminal infrastructure and threw everybody in jail, the victims of this were going to be without Internet service."
On the night of the arrests, officials brought in Paul Vixie, chairman and founder of Internet Systems Consortium, to install two Internet servers to take the place of the truckload of impounded rogue servers that infected computers were using.
The malware turned off antivirus updates and changed the way the computers reconcile website addresses behind the scenes on the Internet's domain name system. The scam netted the hackers at least $14 million according to the FBI.
"The average user would open up Internet Explorer and get 'page not found' and think the Internet is broken."
Most victims don't know that their computers have been infected by the DNS Malware.
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