catshem wrote:I honestly had no idea this was a thing until today and everyone on the internet was like "GO HERE BECAUSE OMG YOU MIGHT LOSE INTERNET 5EVUR." And then I read a news article and was like "I must live under a rock."
Yeeeeeaaahhh.
They knew about this MONTHS ago. Friend of mine got infected, and no, it was not from the seedier side of the internet. My doctor's office computer got infected, and they know it was from a spam email that looked like it was coming from one of his patients (spoofed). Most of the big ISPs like Cox and Comcast started sending messages to their infected users around Thanksgiving. So if you'd been infected, you'd have known about it by now, but if you hadn't, you'd never know.
There may be a couple hundred thousand infected computers out of the MILLIONS of computers in the US.
The bad thing is that this is a stone beotch to remove. Took my friend a crapload of time to get it off.
Here's the short story: this SuperGenius decided that he would use an exploit to send anyone he infected to HIS webpage which he made to look like an FBI page. This page claimed that you or your computer had been detected doing illegal downloads, looking at kiddie porn, or violating the "Using Computers In Unsafe Manner Law" (BWAHAHAHAHA). It said unless you used an anonymous money service to pay a $100 fine your internet would be turned off and you would be subject to much higher fines. He picked $100 as a nice round number that wouldn't trigger felony charges. Then he packed his bags and fled, figuring that by the time he got to where he was going, he'd have a couple million dollars in his account.
Well he made a big mistake by impersonating the FBI. If he had just made up something like "Bureau of Federal Internet Fraud and Safety" they would have gone "too bad so sad, internet fraud, talk to your ISP." But he didn't. He impersonated the freaking FBI. They had him in the federal pen playing Bubba's Little Pony within 30 hours.
The Feds left the site up so people could fix their computers, but they've had it up for months and months now, and now they are going to turn it off. So anyone who is infected will have all their internet traffic directed to a dead site, and to fix their machines they will just have to do it the hard way: take it to an expert who will sneakernet the fixes.