Telstra has enacted a last minute fix which will keep infected customers online. Picture: Sam Moody Source: The Daily Telegraph
- Users may be blocked from web today due to virus
- Hackers rerouted the web traffic through DNS servers
- FBI seized servers, will shut them down at 2pm AEST
- Telstra fix will reroute infected users, keeping them online
The day where potentially millions of people around the world could lose access to the internet because of a virus installed on their computers more than a year ago.
In Australia Telstra has come up with a temporary solution which will keep customers online, even if they are infected.
In a blog post this afternoon, Telstra's Chief Information Security officer Glen Chisholm announced that Telstra would redirect its 2500 infected customers away from the servers scheduled to be turned off at 2pm (AEST) allowing them to browse the web as normal.
"In simple terms, this redirection overcomes the hijacking of their domain name requests by the malware and allows Telstra to respond to these queries," Mr Chisholm wrote.
"Once infected customers change their DNS settings to any legitimate server, whether provided by Telstra or a third party, the redirection will cease."
The fix will buy customers a little more time to find out whether their computer is infected by the virus.
Click here for a simple diagnosis.
Mr Chisholm emphasized that the company would only redirect addresses identified by the FBI as ones attacked by hackers last November.
The fix only applies to Bigpond ADSL, Cable, Wireless and FTTP customers.
Telstra?s fix will only help a fraction of affected customers. ACMA predicted that more than 6000 Australians would be affected by the outage.
An Optus spokesperson said customers known to be infected with the virus were being contacted to advise them to update their anti-virus definitions and run a scan to remove the DNSChanger malware.
?If they don?t have anti-virus already they can download the Optus Internet Security Suite for a 30 day free trial and use it to remove the virus,? the spokesperson said.
The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) predicts more than 6000 Australians will be affected by the outage.
iiNet, Vodafone Broadband and Virgin Mobile Broadband were not immediately available for comment.
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