The Internet Apocalypse That Wasn't
Posted in: Legal, Privacy & Security at 11/07/2012 18:01
So much for the Internet apocalypse.
Several security experts and media reports predicted that Monday, July 9, would be remembered as the day millions lost their Internet connections -- and possibly their livelihoods. Those concerns did not play out.
At 12:01 a.m. Eastern Time on Monday, the Federal Bureau of Investigation pulled the plug on servers that had been communicating with personal computers infected with a particularly thorny piece of malware. The malware, called DNSChanger, reconfigured the computers' settings for the Domain Name System, or DNS, which functions as the switchboard for the Internet. The DNS translates user-friendly Web addresses like fbi.gov into numerical addresses that allow computers to speak to each other. Without DNS servers operated by Internet service providers, the Internet could not operate.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/10/the-internet-apocalypse-that-wasnt/
