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News
As news stories develop about important changes in the computing world that we feel our customers need to know about, we will provide you a Geek Free version here. You may find some of this interesting and it might let you look smarter than everyone else at social gatherings. .
Top Stories
- DNS
Changer Virus
A dangerous virus that could shut down Internet access for millions of computers on July 9th. (This is important and you need to know if your system is ready.)
For quite some time there have been a variety of serious viruses being distributed by a group of cyber criminals in Estonia under the company name "Rove Digital". These viruses hijacked Internet traffic on infected computers to support the illegal activities of the cyber criminals. The Internet is very dependent on DNS which is an abbreviation for "Domain Name Server". Let us translate that from Geek to English for you. Anytime you see the term "server", it is simply a computer that "serves" information or programs to other computers over a local network or the Internet. A "Domain Name" is simply the user-friendly name or alias for a website such as Google.com, Facebook.com, etc. The computers and servers on the Internet do not understand these user-friendly names without help from a DNS Server. The internet only understands IP Addresses which is the "Internet Protocol" for addressing a specific computer on the Internet. These "addresses" are a series of numbers in the format 123.234.345.456 and they are how computers communicate with each other over the Internet. So when you want to go to www.google.com you type that domain name into your browser and the browser contacts a DNS Server to ask where google.com is at and it returns the IP Address to your computer so it can find the website you requested.
These cyber criminals hijacked infected computers to go to their own DNS Servers, so when you wanted to do a search on google.com, you would get sent to an IP Address that wasn't really google.com without you even knowing it. The bogus site may have even looked like Google, but it wasn't. Google makes a good share of its money from sponsored advertising links that you click on. So if you were infected, the links you clicked generated money (lots of it) for these criminals instead of Google. They weren't stealing your identity or credit information, but they were stealing from Google and sometimes sending you to websites with fraudulent products or more viruses.
The good news is that on November 8th, 2011 the FBI, the NASA-OIG and the Estonian police nailed these guys and shut them down. This was a rare victory over cyber crime, but the bad news is that infected computers could not get to any websites on the Internet without these phony DNS Servers. To give people time to get this thing removed, the FBI put DNS Servers in place to capture the traffic from infected computers and send it to the real websites. So if you are infected, you can operate normally without ever knowing that you are infected. Unfortunately, there is a time limit on how long the FBI can operate these systems and they are going off-line on July 9th. That means if you have this lurking on your system and don't get it removed, you will no longer be able to access any websites on July 9th. Every one using the Internet should check to make sure they do not have the DNS Changer virus or one of the secondary infections. There are lots of websites that let you check for the DNS Changer but they don't tell you if you have something else. Even your existing antivirus is no guarantee because this thing has the ability to modify your regular antivirus so that it cannot detect the DNS Checker. We strongly recommend that your system be checked with clean tools for any possible infections.
- IPv6 is coming
Internet Service Providers world wide took the first step toward changing the way you connect to the Internet.
IP Addresses or Internet Protocol Addresses, are the identity of our computers on the Internet and how they communicate with one another. They are a numeric value in the format of 123.234.345.456 where each of the 3 digit groups can be a number between 0 and 255 and no two computers connected to the Internet can have the same numbers (or address). Think of it the way your telephone works when one telephone, with it's unique number calls another one allowing us to communicate. This description applies to IPv4 or Internet Protocol version 4, which is what we've been using since the world at large started using the Internet but this method needs an upgrade. It all works like it's supposed to but the Internet has grown far beyond expectations and we are quickly running out of available numbers. If this is not upgraded, there will be limits placed on who can get new IP Addresses. Since you can't get on-line without one, you can see where this would start a fight.
Enter IPv6 with its significantly larger capacity. This new protocol has actually been around for a while, but not universally adopted until now. Most Internet Service Providers (the cable, DSL and cellular companies that connect you to the Internet) switched to IPv6 on June 6th so that the Internet can continue to grow. Most computers already have IPv6 installed along with the older IPv4 and will just work with no problem. Some computers can have issues that will begin to cause them problems as more and more of the connections they make will have to use the IPv6. The fix is simple but we recommend that you check your system to make sure you are not going to have a problem.
