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You would think that any corporate IT department worth its salt will have already taken care of any possible fallout from the “Internet Doomsday Virus” problem that is resurfacing today. But according to Kenneth Wisnefski, an online security expert and founder of WebiMax, this includes some major corporations. “More than 10% of Fortune 500 companies in the U.S. still have this malware on their systems and are vulnerable to severe data breaches,” said Wisnefski. “In addition, close to 4% of government computers also remain exposed.”
Here is some background, courtesy of the Washington Post.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation first gave details about the virus last November, when it announced the arrest of the malware’s authors. The virus, as its name indicates, affected computers’ abilities to correctly access the Internet’s DNS system — essentially, the Internet’s phone book. The virus would redirect Internet users to fake DNS servers, often sending them to fake sites or places that promoted fake products. Once the FBI shut down the operation, it built a safety net of new servers to redirect traffic from those infected with the virus.
But that safety net is going offline [today] meaning that anyone who is still infected with the virus will lose access to the Internet unless they remove it from their machine.
Click through to the WaPo article for more information about how to (a) determine if your machine is infected, and (b) remove it from your hardware.
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