According to the BBC a lot of people could lose internet access today or in the next few days, in this headline story. (Note it has a handy link to a DNS checking tool....I'm safe apparently!).

The question though is this, is it a real story or just a blown-out-of-proportion demand at a time when various departments are facing swingeing budget cutbacks, ergo they try and instil panic and fear in the populace, and government officials to ensure they keep their funding?

Or worse still, a good marketing tool for anti-virus producers?

Or even worse, lazy journalism? Personally, on this occasion I have my doubts about this particular option but you never know!

Anyway, I thought I'd post the link to the story and then people can check and see for themselves if they all get a "green tick" or a "red cross".....good luck folks!

Yay, a green tick for me!

I think, given the number of machines involved, the story is a little hyped. How many people use the internet? Having said that it's still an issue that needs addressing.

Okay, so that's two of us to keep the forum running!

Not particularly hyped; except in that the BBC and other news agencies have only just noticed something that's been discussed in the technical press for months.

The snag is that those for whom there would be an issue are those who are least likely to know what the problem is or how to deal with it.

Up I jumps.....am reading this only minutes after deleting a suspicious-looking email [not addressed to me personally, or personally signed] referring to Scottish government e-procurement services and server problems.

I investigated "support@elcom" and got a link to an Australian organisation that deals with intranet systems but still wasn't convinced!

Ah well if it's genuine after all better be prepared for uni info suffering from glitches.....

Certainly over hyped. It's only 19000 machines, of how many in the UK which route to a DNS server? Probably more than 1 per population. Annoying for the 19000, though.

As of the end of June it was 300k distinct IP addresses - still a drop in the ocean, but significantly more than 19k individual machines.

I was referring to the curiously precise number of infections in the UK - 19,589, apparently. You would think with that number they could just find out whose they are and send the Men in Black round.

19k machines in the uk I think was the reference.

I got hit by this recently, Malwarebytes sorted it, and for a change it wasn't porn related but linked in to a win 7 theme id downloaded. No, that wasn't porn either., well, car porn maybe.

As said, I suspect the majority who who haven't fixed the problem most likely never will, although it made me wonder, why, if infected machines have to go through these servers could they not apply a fix remotely from those servers.

Because it's an offence under the computer misuse act.

What has happened is that the black hats cause an infected computer to refer its DNS resolution to a server they control, which in turn sends it to many naughty sites.

The US zapped the naughty servers, but were then faced with the problem of how to fix the issue; they chose to keep the servers on line, delivering *proper* websites, but to try and advise people they had an issue. They now want to just turn off the servers, which means that all those whose DNS configuration still points to one of these servers now won't get anything.

I'd have pointed them *all* to a single page reading something along the lines of:

Don't know about you, but if a web-site I was browsing to redirected to the FBI web-site it would be new trouser time.