Gadgetory

hello I'm Sumi das for inside scoop with me is Seth Rosenblatt senior editor for cnet thanks for joining us thank you for having me on seth has been blogging about the DNS changer virus and was it a lot of hype because 1201 has come and gone we haven't heard much about people who are having problems but as you say it's a catch-22 exactly it's one of those things where if you're infected you're now not on the internet and so we're not going to know about you there are phones people might call somebody please by all means do not call me it's a serious issue of course but I think at this point the larger story is you know people making sure that they have antivirus protection on both windows and mac and android and iOS and you know staying safe on the internet so there were not that many computers though that we're even going to be possibly affected right i mean the percentage of all computer users was relatively small absolutely the original number when the FBI took down the the bad guys in november 2011 was around 550,000 global infections and we think the last number i heard was around 330,000 infections it's hard to tell at this point of course because the network that was keeping those people connected to the Internet is now down even if you weren't affected by DNS changer the fact that similar malware could just shut down your access to the Internet of course is rather troubling so you know is this a lessons their lesson to be learned here I mean could this happen in the future too and cause greater damage possibly absolutely I think that this is one of those situations where the the bad guys never want to disconnect you from the internet that that kind of messing with people doesn't really happen that much anymore what they really want from you is your money and so what this virus would do is it would redirect you to pay two pages that would serve ads or pages that would try to get you to submit your personal information they want your cash they don't want to disconnect you okay and you say that the best protection is to just make sure you're running antivirus software absolutely is it that simple though you don't have to do anything beyond that no I mean you do have to be careful about what sites you go to because while security software will protect you a lot of these attacks these days are phishing attacks so they're trying to get you to submit your information because as I said they want your money they're not interested in you know command nearing your computer for nefarious uses they just want you to give them cash so obviously that's going to send up some red flags for people and hopefully they're not going to submit anything absolutely and they're actually very clever a lot of them now use these these sites where it looks like you're submitting your information for say a contest or something and so you put in your email address and you put in your phone number and you know maybe even your home address and before you know it you're getting charged premium SMS spam or all kinds of stuff and it so the stuff looks legitimate and it's in fact not legitimate at all ok any other telltale signs though well one very good trick is to look at your url bar on the website that you're visiting and make sure that it is the URL that it should be if it if it doesn't say facebook com or if it doesn't have your bank's proper spelling for its name don't you know don't do anything close the window mm-hmm okay all right all right I have to say though this ruin me a little bit of the hype leading up to y2k not as much but I know I I agree you know but but it's one of those things where fixing your computer from DNS changer after they've shut down the network is much much more difficult and it is when it is connected so there was a deadline and I think was important that everybody go to the website the government website that would check your computer and it seems like a lot of people did that because everyone's been commenting on stories that we've published that they're not infected okay well that's so far as good news that no absolutely Seth thanks so much thank you for inside scoop I'm Sumi das thanks for watching