Four million computers involved. Whoa.
The FBI has taken down a huge botnet, it’s being called the biggest cybercriminal takedown in history. Four million computers involved. Basically a botnet from Estonia (which may have the dubious distinction of being the first country attacked in cyberwarfare a few years back) was highjacking the DNS settings of victim computers so it could control where victim computers would be sent to. DNS, aka: Domain Name System, is what tells your computer where Internet and network resources are. You type in www.google.com and through DNS, your computer finds out the IP address that is used by www.google.com. So if you control what location information is sent to computers then you can direct them where you actually want them to go e.g. porn sites, sites selling malicious software posing as security applications, phishing websites, etc.
