If those computers were critical to infrastructure or big businesses then taking so many computers offline at once could have caused massive economic damage. When the operation was shut down there were an estimated four million computers around the world which were infected, and the FBI quickly realised that just shutting down the malware servers would leave all those users without any access to the web. The malware affected both Windows and OS X.Īll those infected computers needed to connect to the web via the three server sites that the programmers were using - in New York, Chicago and Estonia. viruses, Trojans, worms and keyloggers regularly flush the DNS cache and. Trojan Horse rather than replicate capture some important information about a computer system or a computer network. Worms replicate itself to cause slow down the computer system. If you'd like in-depth detail on the case, the FBI's press release goes into the full criminal minutiae. In DNS cache poisoning or DNS spoofing, an attacker diverts traffic from a. Virus is a software or computer program that connect itself to another software or computer program to harm computer system.

Thousands upon thousands of infected users 'clicking' on their ads several times a day, at a few cents each time, meant the scammers racked up around £9 million before being caught and shut down in a joint sting between the FBI and Estonian police. Every time the ads were clicked, they would receive a few cents - the malware simply changed the DNS settings of infected computers so that when a user wanted to visit an innocuous site (say, ) they would be redirected to the page with ads. This all started with a group of programmers (six Estonian, one Russian) at a spam company called Rove Digital, who rigged up some software that would redirect people to ads that they controlled.

Dns worm virus