FBI’s Looming Server Shutdown Could Leave Chunks of the Internet Dark [VIDEO]


The FBI set up temporary, secure servers late last year to replace those created by seven individuals arrested for Internet fraud. “…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,” the FBI said at the time.

Companies’ whose websites were hosted on those servers had 120 days to rid them of the malware known as DNSChanger Trojan, before the FBI shuts off the servers. Those 120 days are almost up, and for sites that haven’t been cleaned, that could mean they’ll disappear from the Internet entirely on March 8. And there may be a significant chunk of the web that will disappear.

Security expert Brian Krebs claims that half of the Fortune 500 companies and PCs at nearly 50% of all federal government agencies still have the malware on their networks.

“Yes, there are challenges with removing this malware, but you would think people would want to get this cleaned up,” Rod Rasmussen, president and chief technology officer at Internet Identity, told Krebs. “This malware was sometimes bundled with other stuff, but it also turns off antivirus software on the infected machines and blocks them from getting security updates from Microsoft.”

Check out the video above to learn more about the malware and the approaching deadline.

Thumbnail image courtesy of iStockphoto, Henrik5000

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