Known IP threat.

It is authentic. That being said, this has to rank high on the chart of worst ways to handle a cyber issue by the FBI... They should not have kept those DNS servers up and running when they took them over 6-9 months ago. They essentially kept thousands of infected computers up and running, and their owners clueless as to what was going on. Now, when July comes around, the FBI will get the blame and bad press, not the bastards who created and distributed this malware. Not to mention how counter-intuitive the process they are using to get infected users to 'resolve' their issues. The website they want you to visit looks like the typical scam website we normally tell people to NEVER visit, etc. "Hey, go here and click on this big green button to see if you're infected." Yea, that's not suspicious at all... Like I said earlier, they should have simply taken these DNS servers offline when they took them over months ago and affected users would have realized something was wrong and taken action. Instead, they let all these computers stay online, with their update process disabled, and making them prime targets for even more infections, etc. I wouldn't be surprised if these computers were infected with a variety of other unrelated malware and viruses; these computers have not been able to get the latest updates and security patches in over 6 months, making them prime targets for a variety of bad things...

That being said, the media also has some blame in this matter. Their headlines make it sound like hundreds of thousands of people will lose their internet access in July for no reason. All these computers are infected with tons of malware and have been running for almost a year or more. But that doesn't make as good a headline and thus increase clicks to their websites or increase readership. Sensationalism in headlines is more profitable for the media...

 

Erika, you misunderstood what I was saying. I'm not saying that this information should not be shared, which is why I moved it out of the Openband forum and into this more general forum which can be read by a wider group of people. I'm also not against the information being made available by many media outlets, I simply find the way the media is sensationalizing this with misleading headlines to be opportunistic. Their headlines make it sound like part of Internet will go dark in July, which is an exaggeration...

What I was trying to say in my previous posting is that the way the FBI handled these DNS servers AFTER they arrested the hackers was flawed. They did not need to have these servers kept online for the past 6-9 months while the hackers were put on trial. In fact, some conspiracy theorists have even been stating that they kept them online so they could 'track' infected people , and what they were doing online. I don't necessarily agree with this theory, but it's out there.

Like I said, when they arrested the perps, they should have shut down these servers and owners of the infected systems would have realized something was wrong, that it was due to a malware infection, and that they need to get their system fixed, cleaned, etc. Now, 6-9 months later, these same people were left prone to many other forms of malware because their systems could no longer be updated etc. And when the servers finally get shutdown, they will blame the government because they probably don't know any better, and the headlines will say something along the lines of "FBI turns off Internet access for thousands of Americans"...

These servers were NOT kept online in order to prosecute the hackers. They were kept online because someone up the 'food-chain' with probably inadequate facts and technical knowledge made a decision without thinking about the consequences of how they would deal with the situation down the road. Your belief that they didn't know any info or how to fix it until they deposed and/or interrogated the perps is flawed. I work in the world of cyber-security and can tell you they knew exactly how the whole mechanism worked, etc. That's how/why they were able able to make the arrests in the first place...

For what it's worth, many technologists are expressing the same sentiments that I am; the FBI should never have kept these DNS servers online, which caused more harm to these thousands of users than good.