Wormy Situation

Net Could Be Down in March

Social Issues – In early March, a healthy portion of the internet may very well be unplugged at the hands of the FBI due to a viral attack that happened last year.

You see, last year the malicious worm (computing script, not wiggly bug) DNSChanger Trojan was released, corrupting computers worldwide. The trojan redirected infected computers to servers containing malicious sites. The men who made the worm were arrested, and the FBI set up surrogate servers to take that traffic while businesses and sites cleaned and repaired their infected systems.

The thing is, many companies haven’t gotten these issues fixed, so when the deadline hits and the FBI unplug the place-holding servers, there’s a good chance many people could effectively be out of luck.

A coalition named the DNSChanger Working Group is considering the ways in which the internet can be weaned off of these temporary servers. It is a combination of law enforcement and the computer and information industry, and hopefully it will be able to come up with a solution. Otherwise, we may, in fact, get our 2012 cataclysm. Or at least something that feels like it.

Read more at RT.