As most of you who pay attention to the news have heard lately that the FBI plans to “shutdown the internet”. Now I get that there really isn’t any other way to phrase the headline to make it easy for everybody to understand what is really going on. But to those who might be affected it might seem like the internet is shutdown since nothing will load for them if they are infected with “DNS Changer” malware.
To explain what is really going to happen and what you can do to fix it!
Every website you go to has an address that you type in. When you type it out that’s the “domain name” like aaronredding.com. That name has an address associated with it, just like looking up a name in the phone book and getting a phone number. The service that does the lookup of that information is called a Domain Name Service or DNS.
With that explained comes the fun part. Right now if you were infected with the “DNS changer” malware you could type in www.google.com but you could be directed to a fake Google search page. Or you could be browsing a site and the ads on that site could be from malicious servers with more malware on it waiting to infect your computer. The FBI has put a site up to check if you are infected http://www.dns-ok.us/ This site is no longer available, but the content is still relevant.
If you are infected this site gives you the tools to clean your system. I personally have not used hitman pro or Norton power eraser so I do not know how well they work, but Kaspersky Labs TDSSkiller is a great tool to remove just about all malware that I’ve come across in computer cleanups.
Now if you scan your system and you are still “infected” according to the dns-ok.us site then it could be that your router has been compromised and has been changed to point to the “rouge” DNS server. I would have to post another post about how to change the DNS settings in routers so that I can cover a lot more of them but I recommend that if you know how to change the DNS server settings on your router that you change it to point to Open DNS. The Open DNS server addresses are 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220 You might notice a speed increase in surfing the internet by changing it to them versus your ISPs DNS servers.
Hopefully this helps take the fear that you might not have internet one day!