Amarillo, Texas - It's being called "Internet Doomsday," and it's set to happen this Monday, when tens of thousands of people are predicted to lose access to the web.
But you can stop it from happening to you.
Just months ago, the FBI took down an Estonian cyber fraud ring that infected millions of computers worldwide with a virus, through a group of domain name servers.
While the servers were taken back and cleaned up, this was only a temporary solution.
As many as 64,000 Americans may lose access to the Internet when the clock strikes 12:01 Monday morning.
Research Analyst Jeremy Scott explains, "There was a court order for the FBI to take those servers down after they had given time for the victims to remediate their systems. July 9th, Monday morning is that deadline."
But there are still countless computers infected with the malware, that are forced to connect to the bad servers.
Scott says, "It takes away their DNS settings so they are not going to be able to hit a valid DNS Server to connect to something like google.com or even worse, can't get to their bank account."
Many users can easily tell if their computers are affected by the virus.
Counter Intelligence Agent Taylor Huey explains, "A virus may come up on the desk top by itself, scan your computer, tell you that you have a problem, and that you need to buy their software in order to fix it."
But there are others who have no idea they have this problem on their hands.
Fortunately, it's easy to figure out and can be done before the so called "doomsday" deadline.
Visit the web site www.dns-ok.us to check your computer.
Huey says, "If you are infected by one of these viruses, the first step is to remove it."
Then call your Internet service provider to get your DNS changed.
Huey says, "If you don't address it, it won't fix itself because your computer will continue trying to access the server that is no longer available. So until you change the setting yourself or contact your service provider, it will stay like that."
This problem only applies to Windows users, so if you own a Mac, you have nothing to worry about.
