About a quarter-million computer users around the world are at
risk of losing internet access on Monday because of malicious software
at the heart of a hacking scam that US authorities shut down last
November.
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.
When authorities took down the rogue servers, a federal judge in New York ordered that temporary servers be kept in place while the victims' machines were repaired. The temporary servers will shut down at 12:01 am EDT (0401 GMT) on Monday, which means the infected PCs that have not been fixed will no longer be able to connect to the internet.
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.
When authorities took down the rogue servers, a federal judge in New York ordered that temporary servers be kept in place while the victims' machines were repaired. The temporary servers will shut down at 12:01 am EDT (0401 GMT) on Monday, which means the infected PCs that have not been fixed will no longer be able to connect to the internet.
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