Lights on an Internet switch are lit up as with users in an office in Ottawa, on February 10, 2011. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Adrian Wyld
July 06, 2012 - 12:10 PM
MONTREAL - A Queen's University professor says about 9,000 Canadian computers could be infected and lose Internet service on Monday when the FBI shuts down temporary servers.
Electrical and computer engineering associate professor Thomas Dean says that overall some 300,000 computers, most of them in the United States, Italy and India, could be infected and lose service.
Warnings about the Internet problem have been splashed across Facebook and Google and Dean says that initially about four million PCs were infected.
The FBI took down hackers last fall and had clean servers installed to take over from the malicious servers so that people wouldn't lose their Internet service right away, but the replacements are being turned off on Monday.
Dean says Canadians can go to www.dcwg.org to check if their computers are infected and take appropriate measures. He says Canadians may also have to check routers to see if they're infected.
If a computer is infected it will start up but users will get an "error message" and won't be able to get online.
News from © The Canadian Press, 2012