A lot of you reading this are either aware or have encountered links to web sites that turned out to be fronts for hackers. This week, as reported by News.com, six people were arrested in Estonia for allegedly being a part of the creation of the malware program known as DNSChanger. The malware has infected over 4 million PCs, including 500,000 here in the US, and redirected the people who used those PCs to rogue web sites that generated ad money for the hacker team. A seventh suspect in Russia is still on the loose.
Basically this malware attack caused people who used those infected PCs to be redirected to rogue DNS servers, which then pointed them to specific web sites designed to raise money for the hackers. Those false servers were later shut down and replaced by real DNS servers in the hope that even people who have infected PCs will no longer be able to surf to those sites.
The FBI is currently letting people who might have an infected PC check to see if that is indeed the case via a special FBI web site. PCs which have the DNSChanger program installed are also prevented from updating their operating system or any anti-virus programs.
As always, the first rule in using your own PC is safety and that includes not clicking on web sites or emails that look suspicious. You never know when things could suddenly pop up while surfing the net.