Monday

[Hum]

The Great Internet Blackout of 2012, which the FBI feared could impact thousands of Internet users, came and went with little more than a whimper on Monday, as the so-called "Doomsday" deadline passed with few reports of outages.

At 12:01 a.m. EDT, the FBI shut down temporary servers it had set up to handle Web traffic for thousands of computers infected with a virus spread by a ring of cyber criminals the bureau busted last year. Those using the estimated 200,000 computers still infected with the virus were expected to lose their Internet connection after the servers were closed down.

But Monday's big "blackout" failed to materialize.

"The impact seems to have been limited," CBS MoneyWatch.com said. According to the FBI, 41,800 of the 211,000 worldwide computers infected with the virus were in the United States, but U.S. Internet providers reported vastly fewer victims.

In Australia, the "anticipated chaos at ISPs did not eventuate and, at worst, caused little more than a modest increase in calls to helpdesks," according to theaustralian.com.

In the U.K., "security firms reported no significant outages linked to the DNS Changer virus," the Daily Mail reported, "as many Internet service providers have either implemented a fix or contacted customers with steps to clean their computers."

full story

[Charisma Veteran]

What?! A crazy doomsday scare perpetrated by a group of people who are just insecure bullies deep down, and believed by thousands of the gullible and easily swayed, turned out to be a bunch of hot air? Nowai.

[Dashel]

You mean 'cybersecurity experts' Char. ;)

[dead.cell]

What?! A crazy doomsday scare perpetrated by a group of people who are just insecure bullies deep down, and believed by thousands of the gullible and easily swayed, turned out to be a bunch of hot air? Nowai.

Hopefully you didn't buy the "How to Survive the Monday Black Out" books. :laugh:

[andrewbares]

Well the FBI publicized the info really well and warned people months ago. Even my mom was worried about it and knew about it. I bet they used to have "millions" of people using it, but that all changed when the main news stations were telling people to check their computers.

[Bryan R.]

I've had clients call me up as well my mother-in-law worried about the FBI literally "shutting down the internet" and if they were "safe". I told them to just think about it for one second and ask yourself if that makes sense. I don't care how little you know about how the internet works, no one should be this gullible.

[Charisma Veteran]

Hopefully you didn't buy the "How to Survive the Monday Black Out" books. :laugh:

/me quietly hides the copy of "Surviving The Big Scary Internet-Go-Bye-Bye For Dummies" under the table

[Tom]

This reminds me of the Conficker virus of 2008.

[FloatingFatMan]

Anyone with more than half a brain cell already knew this was a complete non-starter anyway. Like everything else the media try to whip up with technology scaremongering.

[ViperAFK]

I do dsl tech support and people constantly kept calling in about this internet "blackout". I had people call saying that they unplugged their modem all day to escape the "blackout" (yeah... sure).

We had a script running server-side to detect if anyone was even contacting these rogue dns servers, not a single customer was even effected. I hate it when the news plays up these nonexistant malware scares.

[Detection]

If it was true, and all these people were using these DNS servers and were actually infected with the DNS Changer virus, then surely the sensible thing to do would have been to cut the servers asap and leave them with no net, essentially forcing them to have their machine looked at and in most cases cleaned of the virus

[Guest nicconics]

I do dsl tech support and people constantly kept calling in about this internet "blackout". I had people call saying that they unplugged their modem all day to escape the "blackout" (yeah... sure).

We had a script running server-side to detect if anyone was even contacting these rogue dns servers, not a single customer was even effected. I hate it when the news plays up these nonexistant malware scares.

Que up CNN's 'situation room"

dun dun dun

[Growled Member]

And this is why I rarely listen to the experts.