Virus Could Blackout Nearly 250,000 PCs

Some blogs and news reports hyped the risk of an outage, warning of a potential “blackout” and describing the Alureon malware as the “Internet Doomsday” virus.

Yet experts said only a tiny fraction of computer users were at risk, and Internet providers would be on call to quickly restore service. They said they considered the threat to be small compared with more-prevalent viruses such as Zeus and SpyEye, which infect millions of PCs and are used to commit financial fraud.

As of this week, about 245,000 computers worldwide were still infected by Alureon and its brethren, according to security firm Deteque. That included 45,355 computers in the United States.

The viruses were designed to redirect Internet traffic through rogue DNS servers controlled by criminals, according to the FBI. DNS servers are computer switchboards that direct Web traffic.

Information on how to identify and clean up infections can be found on a website that a group of security firms and other experts set up: www.dcwg.org.

“It’s a very easy one to fix,” said Gunter Ollmann, vice president of research for security company Damballa. “There are plenty of tools available.”

Many of the machines that remain infected are probably not in active use since most victims were notified of the problem, said security expert Johannes Ullrich, who runs the Internet Storm Center, which monitors Web threats.

The United States has charged seven people for orchestrating the worldwide Internet fraud. Six were arrested in Estonia, while the seventh, who was living in Russia, is still at large. Tallinn has so far extradited two of the men to New York where they appeared in Manhattan federal court.

 

Prateek Panda

Prateek is the Founder of TheTechPanda. He's passionate about technology startups and entrepreneurship and enjoys speaking to new founders every day. Prateek has also been consistently regarded as one of the top marketing experts in the region.

Recent Posts

The AI-driven CFO: How Artificial Intelligence is redefining financial leadership in the tech era

The Chief Financial Officer (CFO) is no longer the only one responsible for budgets and…

1 day ago

From Roblox to Python: How game development educates kids on AI principles

AI is no longer in the distant future, discussed only in university classrooms or interactive…

3 days ago

M&A: The art of the deal

The Tech Panda takes a look at recent mergers and acquisitions within various tech ecosystems…

5 days ago

As we seek to create robots that’re more ‘human’ who’s helping? AI

As robotics progresses towards creating humanoid robot helpers, our tendency is to create them in…

1 week ago

Japan’s Web3 Strategy: A Safe Haven for Chinese Investors Fleeing Capital Controls?

On June 7, 2025, Japan enacted a series of regulations aimed at enabling stronger consumer protections…

1 week ago

Agentic AI Is Reshaping Data Infrastructure—Are Data Warehouses Obsolete?

Introduction: The Signal Behind Snowflake’s CEO Change In the spring of 2024, Snowflake, a star…

1 week ago