THOUSANDS of people are about to lose access to the internet because of a DNS change virus.
The virus, which is commonly, called a DNSChanger infects a users computer with a small virus that changes the computer DNS settings from using your Internet Service Providers DNS server to one set up by a group of criminals.
DNS (Domain Name System) is a critical part of how the internet works and it is what gives your computer the addresses and locations of websites on the internet. It converts user-friendly names to IP addresses. The criminals can now control what websites your computer sees when you go to a certain page.
You will think that you are going to a legitimate website when in fact it will more than likely be a website created by a criminal to look like the legitimate site.
Your personal details can then be captured. The FBI states that "late last year six Estonian nationals were arrested and charged with running a sophisticated internet fraud ring that infected millions of computers worldwide with a virus and enabled the thieves to manipulate the multi-billion-dollar internet advertising industry".
To assist infected users and keeping them connected to the internet, the DNS servers set up by the criminals were temporarily replaced with clean DNS servers to allow people time to remove the virus from their computers. These temporary clean servers will be turned off on July 9, 2012.
This means that anyone who has an infected computer will lose access to the internet from this date.
As part of an Australian government initiative users can go to a website to check if their computer is infected with this virus.
The exception would be if a user's internet service provider has already taken steps to divert their users DNS from the temporary server to the ISP's DNS server. In this case the website will indicate that your computer is not infected however it may still be.
To check if your computer is infected you can go to the following website: www.dns-ok.gov.au