Unless you live in a cave, you have probably heard lead-ins to the story from reporters, “Enjoy the Internet while you have it.” These reports make reference to Monday, July 9th, 2012 as Internet Doomsday.
Here is what you should know about the threat:
- It isn’t new. This malware has been around for a while.
- If your PC is serviced regularly, and your antivirus program is active, it is unlikely to be a problem.
- There is no impending attack. Potential outages will actually be caused by the FBI taking temporary DNS servers offline. If your PC is infected with this malware, then you will lose Internet access until the malware is removed and the proper DNS settings are restored.
- According to current reports, 360,000 PCs worldwide and 64,000 PCs in the United States (US) are still infected. Per census data (July 2011) there are over 311 million people living in the US. So there are a relatively small number of infected PCs here.
Nonetheless, you can go ahead and check whether your system has been compromised using the following link: http://www.dns-ok.us/
Since servers in the corporate environment typically provide DNS information to the connected workstations in an office, your office DNS servers should also be checked. For more details on this issue, refer to the FBI article.
About the Author: Kevin Shea is President of InfoSystems Integrated, Inc. (ISI); ISI provides a wide variety of outsourced IT solutions to investment advisors nationwide. For details, please visit isitc.com, contact Kevin Shea via phone at 617-720-3400 x202 or e-mail at kshea@isitc.com.