Trend Micro and the FBI are very pleased to announce today the dismantling of a criminal botnet, in what is the biggest cybercriminal takedown in history.
This concerted action against an entrenched criminal gang is highly significant and represents the biggest cybercriminal takedown in history. Six people have been arrested through multinational law enforcement cooperation based on solid intelligence supplied by Trend Micro and other industry partners. more than 4 million victims in over 100 countries have been rescued from the malign influence of this botnet and an infrastructure of over 100 criminal servers has been dismantled with minimal disruption to the innocent victims.
If you are worried that you might have been a victim of this criminal activity, the FBI have made an online tool available which will allow you to check if your DNS server settings have been tampered with.
First you will need to discover what your current DNS server settings are:
On a PC, open the Start menu by clicking the Start button or the Windows icon in the lower left of your screen, in the Search box type “cmd” and hit return (for Windows 95 users, select “Start“, then “Run“).This should open a black window with white text. In this window type “ipconfig /all” and hit return. Look for the entry that reads “DNS Servers” and note down the numeric addresses that are listed there.
On a Mac (yes they can be victims too), click on the Apple icon in the top left of your screen and select “System Preferences“, from the Preferences panel select the “Network” icon. Once this window opens, select the currently active network connection on the left column and over on the right select the DNS tab. note down the addresses of the DNS servers that your computer is configured to use.
You can check to see if these addresses correspond to servers used by the criminals behind Operation Ghost Click by using this online tool provided by the FBI, simply enter the IP addreses, one by one and click the “check ip” button.
If you feel that you computer may have been infected, you can visit Trend Micro’s HouseCall for a free scan and clean-up and notify the FBI by submitting this form. You should also contact your Internet Service Provider for advice on restoring your legitimate DNS settings.
Ongoing updates on this threat can be found on our Operation Ghost Click landing page.


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Please check your instructions for Windows. Pressing “Start” then “Search” does not open a black box (DOS) but pressing “Start” then “Run” does.
Imprecise instructions cause a lot of frustration for people that are unfamiliar with computers.
Hi David, my instructions for Windows PCs are based on Windows Vista or Windows 7. If you type “cmd” into the search box and hit return you will end up with a command prompt window. I deliberately chose not to advise people to select the “Run” option because this menu item is hidden in a default installation, so I would have had to include instructions on how to enable it.
Thanks for reading,
Rik
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