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Malware Monday has limited effects
We've been hearing about the warnings for weeks. That computers infected with a certain type of malware would be knocked offline Monday.
Nationwide, few ended up being affected, and the reason why could be that internet providers like Charter say the issue was taken care of long before Monday. Last year the FBI said 277,000 people nationwide were infected, but you say the number is now closer to 40,000. That's right, and people I talked with today said 40,000 is a pretty small number when you think about the 2.3 billion internet users around the world. What kept the number down? Well the FBI notified many large internet service providers, like Charter, so companies were able to protect many of their customers from today's big internet shutdown six months ago. The day that was supposed to knock millions of people offline has passed. "What happened was that the Trojan would redirect to some DNS servers which are places that translate the names of computers into the internet addressing system that they use so when that happened the FBI took over those servers and made them legitimate servers so that they would work properly," said Erik Nielson, Tech Support. But at 11:00 Central Time that safety net was turned off. "So people who are pointing to those servers their DNS no longer resolves and they don't get their internet access anymore," said Nielson. The worldwide malware infection initially affected more than 200,000 people, but the number continues to decrease. As of July 8th the number declined to 41,800. If you've tried to access your Internet and this is the screen that pops up chances are you've been infected and here's what you can do to fix the problem. "The first thing we do is check the computer for the malware. We'll run a series of test and different diagnostic software to fix the problem. Victims with Internet issues are told to contact their local Internet providers," said Jim Gustafson. Gustafson, Tech Support at Computer Concepts, says you can never check a computer for viruses, too much. But he also cautions internet users to click carefully. "Don't always assume that the pop up that came up is safe," said Gustafson. News 5 spoke with the General Manager of Charter Communications. He said the FBI provided with a list of IP addresses that were compromised almost six months ago, those customers were then moved over to a new server. |
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