Could the internet really shut down?

Thousands of users around the world are likely to lose internet access on Monday thanks to a virus called DNS Changer – how bad could things get, asks Matt Warman.

As viruses go, DNS Changer appeared fairly harmless – initiated in 2007, it simply generated fraudulent clicks on adverts, and made its Estonian creators something under £10million. Infected computers accessed the web slightly more slowly, but their users could be forgiven for not even noticing they had a so-called “botnet infection”, let alone realising that they were aiding a criminal gang.

In shutting down the virus, however, the FBI opened a can of worms that reveals what one analyst calls “a weakness in the internet’s infrastructure”. Dan Brown, director of security research at web firm Bit9, says that worse still the FBI’s “band-aid approach” mirrors how security as a whole has evolved on the web. “Generally,” he says, “it has preferred band-aids over real solutions”.

The problem arises because DNS Changer alters the directory that tells a computer the digital address to which intelligible sitenames refer: so rather than Amazon.co.uk leading you to the online bookshop, it redirects you to a fraudulent site, derives revenue from the invisible click and then passes you on to where you wanted to go. The FBI’s solution was simply to replace the criminal server, to tell people that something was wrong and to keep passing the traffic through. Now, however, it says that it can’t spend endless taxpayers’ money on maintaining that server. When it turns it off on Monday, some 350,000 people will lose their connections, of whom around 20,000 live in Britain.

Read more: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/internet/9381112/Could-the-internet-really-shut-down.html