These guys want to help. Really.

Will your Internet suddenly vanish on Monday, July 9? Will you click on that new cute kitten video only to see full-blown failure, white noise, an Indian head placard, as the vicious "Alureon/DNSChanger bot" takes its final victims down in a mini-Webageddon? No, probably not.

Yes, as of 12:01 a.m. on July 9 the FBI will remove its phalanx of protective servers that have been keeping still-infected computers safely online. However the panic over the possibility of losing Internet access is probably, at this point, out-of-proportion to the actual level of infection. In the United States the number of still-infected computers runs in the 100s of thousands. Out of hundreds of millions of computers. Think about those odds for a moment--chances are excellent you are not among the infected, the unclean.

Still, if yours is one of those rare computers under the thrall of the virus concocted by Estonian cybercriminals  in 2011 (most of whom are now incarcerated), we're happy to inform you one more time that you can fix the problem. The page linked in the preceding sentence will point users to a wealth of tools that can assist in cleansing your porn and cat video-viewing box of the doomsday bug.

Safe journeys, you few thousand unfortunates.

DNSChanger oozed out of Estonia and may have fouled up as many as a half-million computers in the United States. The feds' temporary fix to keep the worm from propagating was to replace infected servers with clean surrogates.

Coordinating with the Estonian authorities who arrested those believed responsible for the worm, the FBI set up what amounted to a Maginot Line of temporary servers that would to give businesses and private individuals affected by DNSChanger time to cleanse infected systems. However, this may not have been enough to save all the afflicted. Cyber security journalist Brian Krebs writes:

Computers still infected with DNSChanger are up against a countdown clock. As part of the DNSChanger botnet takedown, the feds secured a court order to replace the Trojan’s DNS infrastructure with surrogate, legitimate DNS servers. But those servers are only allowed to operate until March 8, 2012. Unless the court extends that order, any computers still infected with DNSChanger may no longer be able to browse the Web.

[Internet Identity president and CTO Rod] Rasmussen said there are still millions of PCs infected with DNSChanger. "At this rate, a lot of users are going to see their Internet break on March 8."

According to Mr. Krebs, Internet Identity believes DNSChanger infected "half of all Fortune 500 firms, and 27 out of 55 major government entities."

Large network operators unsure as to whether their system is infected can contact the DNS Changer Working Group for assistance here. Private users may be able to ferret out a localized infection by following steps outlined here, at DCWG.org.

[Krebs on Security via RT]