Virus Scare for Monday, Jul 9, 2012

Posted on: July 7th, 2012

Since yesterday, I got about half a dozen questions about this “virus” that’s supposed to wreak havoc on Monday.

The information that’s being circulated and syndicated in the press is misleading and blown way out of proportion and made to look very scary!

Here are some more down-to-earth facts:

1. The virus (trojan) in question has been known for many months. So, unless your antivirus is severely outdated or inoperational, there’s no chance that this virus would still be on your computer.

2. This virus made a change in the network connection settings which caused traffic to be redirected to the culprits’ servers. The FBI took over that server and had been providing service to those computers which did not have their network connection settings fixed yet. When this FBI server goes off-line these people with messed up settings will go off-line too.

3. We have not found a single instance of this virus, or the settings changes mentioned above in any of the several hundred machines that we have cleaned up since the this virus appeared.
So the chances of this affecting you in any way, shape or form is probably less 1 in 1,000!

4. Even if you lose the internet connection on Monday the fix is very simple and takes about 5 minutes over the phone.

Because of the disproportionately large attention this incident got, the bigger threat is the unscrupulous people who will offer downloadable “fixes” which infect or hijack the victims machines.

I’d recommend NOT to download anything in regards to this”virus”.

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