An easy way to check your computer for the Estonian virus

Last November, some Estonians sent out a virus worldwide called "DNSChanger." It does bad things. The government authorities wanted to shut down the entire internet today in order to scrub it clean. However, the Justice Department delayed this until July.

You can check your own computer quite easily by following this simple instruction, quoted from the end of the article below:

To find out whether your computer or network router is infected with DNSChanger malware, click here. If you see red, your computer is infected. If green, you are ok.

THE ARTICLE ITSELF:

On Nov. 8 of last year, Estonian authorities busted a low-key cybercrime ring who'd used a variety of malware, collectively called "DNSChanger," to infect approximately 4 million PCs, Macs and network routers worldwide and redirect those machines' Web traffic to bogus websites controlled by the gang.

As far as online crime goes, the Estonians were strictly white-collar. They made a small amount of money each time one of the unsuspecting users clicked an ad on one of their sites. Still, the gang made about $14 million in nearly five years.

But a side effect of the scheme was that all Internet queries from the infected machines had to be routed through servers controlled by the gang, most of which were located in the United States.

[ Will the FBI Shut Down My Computer on March 8? Questions and Answers ]

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So after the arrests in November, the FBI was faced with a dilemma: Unplug those servers and cut off millions from the Internet, or keep the servers, or facsimiles of them, up to keep millions of innocent users online?

Justice Department officials chose the latter option, and figured 120 days would be enough time for the infected machines to be cleaned up.

They were wrong. It's not really clear just how many machines are still infected, but security blogger Brian Krebs cited as many as 3 million worldwide a month ago.

The argument could be made that if only a quarter of the infected machines have been disinfected in the past four months, we'll be well into 2013 before they were all sanitized. Hence, some security experts feel that renewing the protective order would just be kicking the can down the road.

To find out whether your computer or network router is infected with DNSChanger malware, click here. If you are infected, make sure you've got a serious anti-virus security suite, update it and run a full system scan. If that doesn't work, contact a computer professional.