We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again just to make doubly sure you’re aware: July 9th (NZ July 10th) is the day the FBI and the American government will switch off DNS servers, cutting thousands of computers’ access to the internet.

Many people have checked to see if they will be affected, but many more have not. There’s a chance that you could be one of them.

This all started in 2007, when a bunch of Estonian hackers created a Trojan virus designed to make them rich. The purpose of the Trojan was to redirect the victims’ browsers away from the sites they wanted to visit, to webpages owned by the Estonians. The advertisements present on their webpages earned the hackers millions of dollars in revenues as redirected traffic was exposed to them.

In November 2011 the FBI arrested the six Estonian hackers responsible for creating the Trojan virus that infected 500,000 computers. It was discovered that an estimated 350,000 computers were still running on those DNS servers.

Surrogate servers were put in place to support those 350,000 computers, with U.S. taxpayers footing the bill. But on July 10th (NZ time) the servers will be turned off, and any computers still running on the DNS servers will be cut off from the internet.

Now would be a very good time to ensure your computer is not infected.

Click here to check if your computer’s DNS server has changed.

Click here to report any changes to the FBI.

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