DNS Security (Part 3 of 4)

Last time we had a brief discussion on DNS (Dynamic Name Servers) and I identified what the problem facing many Internet users are.  Today, I’m going to list what we botters can do to see if we have been infected by this piece of malware.

First off, a website has been created to describe the problem in more detail than I did last time.

http://www.dcwg.org/

To see if you have been infected by this DNS changer malware, you visit this site:

http://www.dns-ok.us/

Since our bots are run on dedicated machines or virtual machines, these machines do not normally surf the Internet and certainly do not visit any high value sites except for MTGO Library.

So we would expect that our bot machines will pass the test.  If for some reason, your bot machines, or your primary machine does not pass the test, the website lists various fixes which are available.

Everything is pretty standard and nothing seems overly dramatic or difficult.

So why am I did I choose this series?  Because this one piece of malware, which has infected hundreds of thousands of users, had garnished such a large response from the various alphabet soup agencies and the computer security companies at large.  I was listening to David Perry, Director of Public Education for Trend Micro who said that each and every day, 50,000 pieces of malware are created.  He made a point to mention that these are unique pieces of malware, not changing a character to up the count and call it a new one.  He said that no one uses a count which include “variants” anymore.

So next time I am going to conclude this series on some advice on computer security and how we can run our bots and not worry about malware.