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The FBI Might Cut Off the Internet For Millions of People on March 8th
Heads up...
In an unprecedented move, the FBI may cut off Internet access to millions of people on March 8th to try to rid the country of a Trojan. Millions of computers are infected worldwide—maybe even yours.
The DNSChanger Trojan originated in Estonia and might be lurking undetected on as many as a half-million computers in the United States, according to Brian Krebs. It has been found on the computers at half of all Fortune 500 companies and at 27 government agencies. The Trojan changes an infected computer's DNS settings to send users to fraudulent websites. What's more, the worm is particularly malicious in that it also prevents you from visiting security websites that might diagnose or fix the problem. While the men authorities suspect are behind the Trojan have been arrested, the Feds, working in concert with the Estonian government, have yet to put the final kill on the worm's botnet.
That's where the Internet shutdown comes in. The FBI has a court order allowing it to set up temporary replacement DNS servers so that those with infected computers or networks can get the worm off of their systems. The court order, however, expires on March 8th. Unless that order gets extended, anybody who hasn't cleaned up their act before it expires, might get cut off from the Internet altogether.
http://gizmodo.com/5885716/the-fbi-might-cut-off-the-internet-for-millions-of-people-on-march-8th
14 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
The FBI isn't going to intentionally cut any computers off from the internet.
I had not heard of this before, but evidently, some time ago they replaced a number of DNS servers, that were known to be compromised, with replacements. The court order that allowed them to do this expires on March 8th. So if your ISP was one of the companies infected, come that date, your computer will not be able to translate domain names into numerical addresses. Unless you use another dns server.
That's just my understanding, and I could be wrong.
EDIT: 216.158.28.196 That's DU's address. Jot it down, just in case. 
http://www.dcwg.org/contact.html
The DCWG is an ad hoc group of subject matter experts, and includes members from organizations such as Georgia Tech, Internet Systems Consortium, Mandiant, National Cyber-Forensics and Training Alliance, Neustar, Spamhaus, Team Cymru, Trend Micro, and the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
DNS Checkup instrux: http://www.dcwg.org/checkup.html
http://www.dcwg.org/checkup2.html
The DCWG is an ad hoc group of subject matter experts, and includes members from organizations such as Georgia Tech, Internet Systems Consortium, Mandiant, National Cyber-Forensics and Training Alliance, Neustar, Spamhaus, Team Cymru, Trend Micro, and the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
DNS Checkup instrux: http://www.dcwg.org/checkup.html
http://www.dcwg.org/checkup2.html
