Some time today or tomorrow, click on www.dns-ok.us to be sure your DNS resolution is OK and correctly looking up IP addresses. This is why. If you don’t click on the link, on Monday there may be black helicopters hovering over your house. Worse, your web browser might not work.
This may only apply to computers in the U.S., but if you aren’t in the U.S. it doesn’t hurt to check it out.
Wow, maha – THANKS!!!
I don’t know I’d have found out about this anywhere else.
My laptop’s on it’s last legs, but there’s no sense in hastening its demise.
Thanks! I hadn’t heard about this.
My local newspaper reported that this story was a hoax.
I got it from Talking Points Memo, so I’m inclined to think it is not a hoax.
What this is is that there was a virus that some people have not fixed on their own computers, and the virus causes the computer to not be able to accurately use DNS, so the user won’t be able to connect to internet sites. The FBI has had alternate servers going for a while to counter this but is pulling them because at some point not fixing your computer is your problem, not everyone else’s.
This perhaps affects 300,000 computers, which is a lot as an absolute number but a pretty small fraction of the computers out there. So check yours, and for heaven’s sake use an antivirus (Avast is free — no excuses). And once in a while it wouldn’t hurt to run Malwarebytes Anti-Malware (also free; look it up).
If you connect to the internet through a home router (as many people do nowadays) your router could be affected if and only if you haven’t changed the default sign-in and password after you installed it. Again, for heaven’s sake why not?
So do check your computer via the links Maha provided above, but really, do the basic minumum to keep your surfing safe.
I find this all very confusing because of the following from the site you sent us too:
Please note, however, that if your ISP is redirecting DNS traffic for its customers you would have reached this site even though you are infected.
Many ISP’s redirect DNS traffic (mine does as of a couple years ago) rather than having it done by servers “out there” on further areas of the internet. (A quick explanation of what DNS means, from Wikipedia: “An often-used analogy to explain the Domain Name System is that it serves as the phone book for the Internet by translating human-friendly computer hostnames into IP addresses. For example, the domain name http://www.example.com translates to the addresses 192.0.43.10 (IPv4) and 2620:0:2d0:200::10 (IPv6).”
So if your ISP does not redirect DNS traffic at their servers, and your computer was affected, you wouldn’t get to the FBI page. But if your computer was affected you would, for now anyway, be able to get to their site via the DNS redirecttion at your ISP.
Bottom line: all you really need to do, if you’re not sure of your system or if your ISP redirtects DNS requests at their end, is to run a scan with your anti-virus software. Any reasonably decent antivirus software will have long ago come up with a detection/fix set of definitions for the virus behind this one.
How long till they blame Obama? Oh, already done? I should have known!