4 replies to this topic

[girlgamer]

Today I came across a warning on the yahoo news site about the possibility that a number of computer systems could be dropping offline Monday Jul 9, 2012, The article was very sparse on details and gave no information other than to check a specific website supposedly hosted by the FBI that would allow me to "check" my computer system for possible infection. From what the article didn't say.

By nature I'm a suspicious woman when it comes to computer malware warnings that refuse to divulge any specific data on the nature of the threat. Additional searching led me to something called the DNSChanger trojan. Some information I found on http://news.cnet.com...ware-infection/, since i happen to trust cnet generally. Another site at http://www.pcmag.com...,2401227,00.asp led me to the fact that this particular malware appears to be a variant form of rootkit.

Because i happen to be a very "hands-on" woman and not one to pay comcast $100+ for stuff i can do myself i downloaded the kaspersky TDSSKiller utility/ And, since i don't particularly care to download additional "accelerators that spam ads" at me I chose not do download from the Kaspersky site and instead went with the softpedia site http://www.softpedia...DSSKiller.shtml. Once the software (a zip file) was downloaded and checked with spybot, clamwin, malwarebytes and Ad-aware I unzipped and ran it. It needed a website hook to complete but my system came up clean.

Upshot is this. If you need to check your system for this particular malware and you feel comfortable with your system you can check and clean your system yourself without the need to jump up on unfamiliar websites that may or may not themselves be compromised. The Yahoo news article was a whole lot less than informative and was pretty much designed to be more of a scare message than anything helpful.

[engunneer]

I saw the same report from a different website this morning. I feel sorry for the people working at ISP call centers next week. Thanks for the links.

[G. Sperotto]

I usually don't worry about malware warnings. They seem to appear every so often in the midia channels but never actually cause as much havoc as the news claimed they would. The weirdest thing about these warnings is that if AV companies are well aware of this new threat before it even becomes active, they can quite easily set up a team to RE the threat and come up with a cure in less than 3 days: Even if the virus are metamorphic, their code is usually as small as possible (to allow the virus to attach itself to small everyday files).

[dmg]

As I understand it, this particular malware was released, detected and pretty much dealt with about a year ago. But a lot of people have not heard about it and may not know they are infected because the FBI has been running a massive 'temporary' traffic redirect system to mitigate the effects of the malware. A system which will be shutdown on Monday, so a LOT of people are not going to be happy.

I am not concerned about the malware itself so much as the fact that a MASSIVE portion of U.S. Internet traffic has been redirecting through a government controlled (and monitored?) server system for over a year now. :shock:

Very disconcerting. :?