Thanks for the April 21 Columbian story “Thousands may lose net in July,” regarding the FBI’s warning of a hacker ring that may have infected PC users around the world. The hackers were caught, but the residual fallout could cause thousands of unsuspecting PC users to lose the net on July 9 if their PCs are not fixed before that date. The story said that “most of the victims are probably individual home users, rather than corporations with technology staffs who routinely check computers.” Most victims won’t be aware their computers have been infected, although it said that the malicious software will likely have caused their Internet surfing to slow down and may have even disabled their anti-virus software, making their machines more vulnerable to other problems.
The FBI listed http://dcwg.org, a website run by its security partner, that will tell you if you’re infected and give you a list of places to go for a safe, fast, free and easy fix. I checked and, wow, I was infected with a Trojan horse virus that the Microsoft (listed website) detected and fixed and now I’m good to go.
My anti-virus software, that continually runs in the background, hadn’t picked this up. Thanks again, Columbian.
Alice Cox
Washougal
