.

(disclaimer) I've been a Mac user for decades, am computer illiterate, and don't understand any of this shit, but maybe it will be helpful to someone. In my opinion, since loss of the internet could conceivably result in injury or loss of life (storm warnings, etc.), such malicious hacking should be subject to capital punishment. (Remove these useless fuckers from society permanently.)

Google warns hundreds of thousands may lose Internet in July

Published May 25, 2012, FoxNews.com


May 22, 2012: Google plans to aid an FBI awareness campaign with these warnings, which should crop up on the search results pages of more than half a million infected web browsers. (Google)

WASHINGTON – Google plans to warn more than half a million users of a computer infection that may knock their computers off the Internet this summer.

Unknown to most of them, their problem began when international hackers ran an online advertising scam to take control of infected computers around the world. In a highly unusual response, the FBI set up a safety net months ago using government computers to prevent Internet disruptions for those infected users. But that system will be shut down July 9 -- killing connections for those people.

The FBI has run an impressive campaign for months, encouraging people to visit a website that will inform them whether they're infected and explain how to fix the problem. After July 9, infected users won't be able to connect to the Internet.

LONG ARM OF SCOFFLAW

An online ad scam is having some unintended ramifications: The fix may prevent as many as 360,000 from getting online. Several sites will show if you're infected:

DNS Changer Working Group: can discern whether you’re infected and explain how to fix the problem.

DNSChanger Eye Chart: if the site goes red, you’re in harm’s way. Green means clean.

The FBI website: type in the IP address of your DNS server to find out if it is infected.

Read more on how to stay safe

On Tuesday, May 22, Google announced it would throw its weight into the awareness campaign, rolling out alerts to users via a special message that will appear at the top of the Google search results page for users with affected computers, CNET reported.

“We believe directly messaging affected users on a trusted site and in their preferred language will produce the best possible results,” wrote Google security engineer Damian Menscher in a post on the company’s security blog.

“If more devices are cleaned and steps are taken to better secure the machines against further abuse, the notification effort will be well worth it,” he wrote.

The challenge, and the reason for the awareness campaigns: Most victims don't even know their computers have been infected, although the malicious software probably has slowed their web surfing and disabled their antivirus software, making their machines more vulnerable to other problems.

Last November, when the FBI and other authorities were preparing to take down a hacker ring that had been running an Internet ad scam on a massive network of infected computers, the agency realized this may become an issue.

"We started to realize that we might have a little bit of a problem on our hands because ... if we just pulled the plug on their criminal infrastructure and threw everybody in jail, the victims of this were going to be without Internet service," said Tom Grasso, an FBI supervisory special agent. "The average user would open up Internet Explorer and get `page not found' and think the Internet is broken."

On the night of the arrests, the agency brought in Paul Vixie, chairman and founder of Internet Systems Consortium, to install two Internet servers to take the place of the truckload of impounded rogue servers that infected computers were using. Federal officials planned to keep their servers online until March, giving everyone opportunity to clean their computers.

But it wasn't enough time.

A federal judge in New York extended the deadline until July.

Now, said Grasso, "the full court press is on to get people to address this problem." And it's up to computer users to check their PCs.

'We started to realize that we might have a little bit of a problem on our hands...'
- Tom Grasso, an FBI supervisory special agent

This is what happened:

Hackers infected a network of probably more than 570,000 computers worldwide. They took advantage of vulnerabilities in the Microsoft Windows operating system to install malicious software on the victim computers. This turned off antivirus updates and changed the way the computers reconcile website addresses behind the scenes on the Internet's domain name system.

The DNS system is a network of servers that translates a web address -- such as www.foxnews.com -- into the numerical addresses that computers use. Victim computers were reprogrammed to use rogue DNS servers owned by the attackers. This allowed the attackers to redirect computers to fraudulent versions of any website.

The hackers earned profits from advertisements that appeared on websites that victims were tricked into visiting. The scam netted the hackers at least $14 million, according to the FBI. It also made thousands of computers reliant on the rogue servers for their Internet browsing.

When the FBI and others arrested six Estonians last November, the agency replaced the rogue servers with Vixie's clean ones. Installing and running the two substitute servers for eight months is costing the federal government about $87,000.

The number of victims is hard to pinpoint, but the FBI believes that on the day of the arrests, at least 568,000 unique Internet addresses were using the rogue servers. Five months later, FBI estimates that the number is down to at least 360,000. The U.S. has the most, about 85,000, federal authorities said. Other countries with more than 20,000 each include Italy, India, England and Germany. Smaller numbers are online in Spain, France, Canada, China and Mexico.

Vixie said most of the victims are probably individual home users, rather than corporations that have technology staffs who routinely check the computers.

FBI officials said they organized an unusual system to avoid any appearance of government intrusion into the Internet or private computers. And while this is the first time the FBI used it, it won't be the last.

"This is the future of what we will be doing," said Eric Strom, a unit chief in the FBI's Cyber Division. "Until there is a change in legal system, both inside and outside the United States, to get up to speed with the cyber problem, we will have to go down these paths, trail-blazing if you will, on these types of investigations."

Now, he said, every time the agency gets near the end of a cyber case, "we get to the point where we say, how are we going to do this, how are we going to clean the system" without creating a bigger mess than before.

www.foxnews.com . . .


.

I can't get infected.

I wash my hands before and after using my computer.

Court rules that Google-NSA spy ties can remain secret

The top-secret US National Security Agency is not required to reveal any deal it may have with Google to help protect against cyber attacks, an appeals court ruled Friday.
The US Court of Appeals in Washington upheld a lower court decision that said the NSA need not confirm or deny any relationship with Google, because its governing statutes allow it keep such information secret.
The ruling came in response to a Freedom of Information Act request from a public interest group, which said the public has a right to know about any spying on citizens.
The appeals court agreed that the NSA can reject the request, and does not even have to confirm whether it has any arrangement with the Internet giant.
"Any information pertaining to the relationship between Google and NSA would reveal protected information about NSA's implementation of its information assurance mission," Judge Janice Rogers Brown wrote in the appeals opinion.
The non-profit Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) filed a formal request to make public documents related to the dealings, and said much of the information had already been in news media.
The request stemmed from a January 2010 cyber attack on Google that primarily targeted the Gmail email accounts of Chinese human rights activists.
According to the Google blog, the Internet group's chief legal officer David Drummond stated that the firm was notifying other companies that may have been targeted and was also working with the relevant US authorities.
The Wall Street Journal and Washington Post reported that Google had contacted the NSA immediately following the attack.
According to news reports, the NSA agreed to help Google analyze the attacks in a bid to better protect the California-based search company and its users from future intrusions.
The reported alliance would seek to allow the spy agency to evaluate Google's hardware and software vulnerabilities, as well as estimate the sophistication of its adversary in order to help the firm understand whether it has the right defenses in place.
Privacy advocates already critical of Google policies regarding saving user data and targeting ads to match online behavior patterns fear that an alliance with the spy network could put private information at risk.

Orwell was right after all... and some of you retards are still calling me a tinfoil hat! haha

ca.news.yahoo.com . . .

fuck google

Not a problem. It only affects windows users; and who the fuck uses Google these days.

LTKilling wrote:



fuck google

I always find baseball bats are more effective when they have barbed wire nailed to the end. And yes; they do rip the side of a face off easier. Anyone else lived on a dodgy housing estate?

As for the net; life goes on. Adapt; change net provider, get a new computer...get a new identity, move on.

j'accuse Caz of being a traitor to francid, washing his hands and admitting it in public

mikgof wrote:

Not a problem. It only affects windows users; and who the fuck uses Google these days.

It can potentially arms any device connected on the internet. It's about DNS servers, servers distributing the internet. Some virus change your ethernet setting to make you us black DNS servers. In order to make your request transit by their channels

These black DNS servers are going to be shut down and if you still use them you won't be able to surf the internet. That's all.

Nappybonesapart wrote:

j'accuse Caz of being a traitor to francid, washing his hands and admitting it in public

I wash my hands only because I like to scratch my butt with cleaned hands.