You could lose your internet access on Monday!

From the Techlicious newsletter:

When your computer wants to visit Techlicious, it looks up the numeric address for the site in a centralized directory on a Doman Name Server (DNS). Last fall, the FBI shut down a ring of hackers who were using malware, named DNS Changer, to route infected computers to rouge DNS servers that redirected users to malicious websites.

The problem was that if these rouge servers were shut down, people infected with DNS Changer would no longer be able to access sites on the web. It was decided that instead of leaving hundreds of thousands of people stranded without Internet access, clean servers would be put in place of the rogue servers to provide Internet access to infected computers. This was always meant to be a temporary measure, giving people time to remove the DNS Changer malware.

On July 9, the clean servers will be shut down. So if your computer is still infected with DNS Changer on July 9, you won’t have access to the Internet.

How can you tell if you’re infected? The DNS Changer Working Group provides links that let you check to see if you’re infected. If you are infected, novice computer users should seek the help of a professional computer service. If you’re more tech-savvy, you can use one of the removal tools.

Either way, you’ll want to do a full back up of your important files to an external hard drive, since removal may require re-installing your operating system. You could also use a cloud backup service, but a hard drive will be much faster for re-instating your files.

Suzanne Kantra
Founder, Techlicious

Have you been a victim of malware?

Oh wow that is a scary thought. I one hand its good to rid the hackers on the other hand we could be going down like sinking ship right with them.

Thanks for the heads up chilly girl world  !

Lips

nice lips, lips... btw...very patrioticly provocative! 

my older laptop was a victim of malware, but hopefully I've rid it of any DNS changers.  One good way to help avoid malware is to make sure your regular account on your computer is NOT set up as an administrator, and that your administrator account is password protected.  It makes a huge difference as I found out the hard way.  If things are acting hinky (like you do a search, click on the link where you want to go and get redirected to some darned obnoxious page with links to other sites, or when your malware detection software or Windows Defender or MS security essentials keeps turning off), and you were set up with administrator rights, create a new administrator account, password protect it, change yours to a regular user, and log in to the admin account, get your security updates, scan, detect, etc...log off, then back into your newly changed regular account and things should get back to normal.  Could take some more hacking away at the hacker's dirty work, but things should improve quite a bit.

i saw that on the news smh oh well one day without my pc shouldnt kill me r maybe..........

While this sounds scary from that article (which I also read the other day), it's not as prevalent as it sounds.  Their estimate on private owner PCs was only around 62,000 still left infected.

Anyway, here's a place you can go to that will check to see if you have it.  I don't have it, and don't know what to do if you find it, but this may put some of your minds at ease.
 

I've checked my computer and it seems I'm safe.

phew.....safe!!

Thanks for the warning and the link. It looks like I'm safe... my brother in law checks my computer so he would told me if something was wrong with it.