Internet virus affects few, if any, Iowa customers

Internet virus affects few, if any, Iowa customers

Jul 10, 2012
A publicity push to raise awareness about an expiring court order that would have potentially left many without Internet access Monday appears to have worked in Iowa, for the most part.

Des Moines metro area Internet providers said Monday they were not aware of any customers who lost access after the FBI took temporary servers offline at 11:01 p.m. CDT Sunday.

“We are not seeing any customer issues regarding the ... DNSChanger (virus),” said Mediacom’s Des
Moines-based spokeswoman Phyllis Peters. “Nothing unusual has been reported.”

Last November, an FBI sting resulted in the arrest of six people in Estonia who had coordinated an advertising scam that had taken over roughly 570,000 computers around the world.

Rather than shut down the criminals’ servers, which would have meant a loss of Internet for computers that had been taken over, the FBI received a court order allowing the agency to set up temporary servers March 12. That order expired Sunday.

The scam involved tricking computer users into installing the DNSChanger virus, which altered computer settings and redirected computer users to a handful of alternate servers. These servers then directed users to websites that contained ads scammers profited from.

CenturyLink said Monday it had been working with customers for months, but would not say whether any of them experienced issues after the temporary servers were shut down.

“Any specific numbers of customers impacted is not information we’ll share,” spokeswoman Nancy DeVinay-McNeley said. “Our work has been ongoing and we have been working with customers for some time.”

This story includes information from the Associated Press.