Some 300,000 people worldwide could lose access to the Internet today as a US-led investigative operation seeks to shut down servers reportedly used by cyber criminals.
The FBI seized the serves in late 2011 following raids to break up a gang of criminals said to have used malicious codes to infect more than 4 million PCs worldwide – the victims’ Web searches were routed to the servers making them to view the adverts that led to the “gang being paid.”
According to the BBC, the gang collected more than US$14 million.
The cyber thieves managed to do this as their servers took over key Web function known as domain name look-up.
The gang is reported to have caused computer infection using a malware known as DNS Changer as it changed “where a PC went to convert domain names to numbers.” Many machines still contain the viruses.
The last few months has seen the FBI work with a number of ISPs and security firms to alert the victims of the infections. Online tools are currently available to offer the service.
According to statistics by the DNS Changer Working Group, the service had enabled the original 4 million infections to whittle away to around 300,000.
A majority of infections are in the US. Other nations around the world also face the Net lose including India, Germany, UK, Italy, and a number of countries in Africa, which have a substantial number of Internet users still confirming the infections with ISC servers.
This means that machines that still infected face Internet lose, as they will have nowhere to go whenever they search locations of specific domains.
