Friday, February 17, 2012

Parts of Internet Could Disappear Amid FBI Server Shutdown

FBI OfficersIn late 2011 the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) set up a bunch of secure servers to replace the ones created by seven individuals that were arrested for internet fraud. According to a statement by the FBI at the time of the arrests, "The dismantling of the defendants' rogue DNS servers - to which millions of computers worldwide had been redirected - would potentially have caused all of those computers, for all practical purposes, to lose access to websites."

Any company in the world that had a website hosted on one of those servers had only 120 days to knock out all the malware known as DNSChanger Trojan before the servers would be shut down by the FBI. Well, those 120 days of grace have almost run their course and any site that doesn't or hasn't cleaned out the malware could see their website erased from the internet entirely come March 8. If this happens, then we could also very well see a sizable piece of the internet disappear on that day as well.

Brian Krebs, a security expert, has claimed that nearly half of the world's Fortune 500 companies and personal computers at almost 50% of all federal government agencies still have the malware on their networks. If that is true, then there are a lot of companies, important ones, that will lose their websites and access to them in just a couple of weeks.

According to President and Chief Technology Officer for Internet Identity, "Yes, there are challenges with removing this malware, but you would think people would want to get this cleaned up. This malware was sometimes bundled with other stuff, but it also turns off antivirus software on the infected machines and blocks them from getting any security updates from Microsoft."

Source: Mashable - FBI's Looming Server Shutdown Could Leave Chinks of the Internet Dark


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