Nearly 300,000 users could lose internet access on Monday if they have failed to remove a virus that FBI agents have warned them about for more than one year.
The malware which was installed on systems more than one year ago would direct users to fake advertising websites instead of the destinations they typed into their web browsers. When the FBI shut down the scam by targeting the hackers servers they realized hundreds of thousands of users couldn’t access the web, so in turn they put up a temporary system in place to “fix” the issue.
The FBI now claims that the number of systems infected by the virus fell from 360,000 in April to 277,000 at the current time. The FBI believes that 64,000 of those infections are located in the United States.
After the FBI system has been taken down users will have to call their service providers to delete the malware and reconnect to the Internet.
The FBI based support system will be shut down at 12:01 a.m. EDT on Monday, July 9
Trying to help customers infected are the internet’s top social media networks, including Facebook and Twitter which have reached out to customers to warn them of the problem.
In the meantime Comcast, Time Warner and other internet providers have warned their customer service teams about the issue so they can quickly help customers solve the problem.
In some cases ISPs have been proactive in dealing with the issue, for example Comcast is able to tell if someone is wrong with a customer’s Internet server and they have already posted information for those users on the Comcast website and sent out letters to affected customers.
If you think your computer has been infected you can visit http://www.dcwg.org to run a quick check.
