Internet Doomsday!
DCWG! What’s all the fuss? This
week’s question comes from a retired high school principal who wants to know if
DCWG is legit. Yes it is and a very
helpful site to help you determine if you are part of the DNS Changer Trojan
infection that is in the news and headed toward a July 9 critical point.
You may remember a previous column where I described a
worldwide botnet that was being run out of Estonia and controlling 4 million
computers in over 100 countries all over the world. In a huge operation involving the FBI and
other worldwide police organizations, seven men were charged in 2011. Since then the FBI has been working to clean
up all the infected DNS servers and keep them from spreading. They have announced that as of July 9 infected
computers will not be able to access the internet in a move to clean up this
huge mess.
As with a lot of these kinds of questions, one leads to
another. What is DNS? From the FBI website: “ DNS (Domain Name
System) is an Internet service that converts user-friendly domain names into
the numerical Internet protocol (IP) addresses that computers use to talk to
each other. When you enter a domain name, such as www.fbi.gov, in your web
browser address bar, your computer contacts DNS servers to determine the IP
address for the website. Your computer then uses this IP address to locate and
connect to the website. DNS servers are operated by your Internet service
provider (ISP) and are included in your computer’s network configuration. DNS
and DNS Servers are a critical component of your computer’s operating
environment—without them, you would not be able to access websites, send
e-mail, or use any other Internet services.
Criminals have learned that if they can control a user’s DNS
servers, they can control what sites the user connects to on the Internet. By
controlling DNS, a criminal can get an unsuspecting user to connect to a
fraudulent website or to interfere with that user’s online web browsing. One
way criminals do this is by infecting computers with a class of malicious
software (malware) called DNS Changer. In this scenario, the criminal uses the
malware to change the user’s DNS server settings to replace the ISP’s good DNS
servers with bad DNS servers operated by the criminal.” In a nutshell, you type in an URL in your
address bar and you surf to another site
run by a criminal enterprise.
0 komentar:
Posting Komentar