Internet blackout for thousands coming this Monday, all tho now it seems the whole thing was a dud, nothing major happen, come Tuesday morning!



That's right, hundreds of thousands of Internet users whose computers are infected by the DNSChanger Malware will be unable to access the Web starting on Monday.

If you didn't know, over the past five years, a group of six Estonian cybercriminals infected about 4 million computers around the world with DNSChanger, a malware that redirected infected users' Web searches to spoofed sites with malicious advertisements.

Well, seems that -over eight months after the FBI and Estonian authorities broke up the ring, on November, 2011- there are still hundreds of thousands of PCs infected with it, and will lose their Internet service this Monday, as the FBI turns off those servers.

The botnet took control of PCs, changing their DNS settings to connect to rogue DNS servers, which allowed the ring to reroute a user’s click on web advertisements to alternative sites and replace web ads with those of companies that paid the ring for clicks. When the FBI shut down the rogue DNS servers at the center of the ring, the US District Court for the Southern District of New York appointed Internet Systems Consortium, a not-for-profit company, to keep running replacement DNS servers so affected users would not lose Internet access before they could remove the botnet and fix their DNS settings. The FBI also posted tools to help PC owners check to see if their system was affected by the botnet. (If you haven’t checked yours, go there now.)

On Monday, July 9, the court order runs out, and ISC will pull the plug on the DNS servers. But by some estimates, as many as 300,000 computers are still using the DNS servers to resolve their Internet searches. Those systems will lose the ability to resolve domain names for web sites and email when the server is disconnected.
Here's the number of PCs infected in the US and Canada:

According to the FBI, the number of computers that probably are infected is more than 277,000 worldwide, down from about 360,000 in April. About 64,000 still-infected computers are probably in the United States.

The Canadian Internet Registration Authority said about 25,000 of the computers initially affected by the malware were in Canada, but now only about 7,000 machines remain infected there, according to Canadian Internet Registration Authority spokesman Mark Buell.
So, you are already warned. Just in case, you can check if you are infected at the DNS Changer Working Group website: http://www.dcwg.org

Well NEWS UPDATE, come Tuesday morning, it seems Internet is busy and running like normal, this warning seems to either work, or was just a over-the-hill reaction by the mainstream news media.

NEWS SOURCE #1: DNS Changer (via) CNN
NEWS SOURCE #2: Still infected 300000 PCs to lose internet access July 9 (via) ArsTechnica

Our thanks to 'Gauss' for this news item!