On Monday, July 9th, tens of thousands of Internet users will lose their service because of malware that was installed on their computers over a year ago without their knowledge.

It was over a year ago, that the FBI shut down an Internation hacking ring that had run an online advertising scam that infected 570,000 computers around the world in an attempt to take control of those computers.

When the FBI was on the verge of shutting down the machines responsible for the attack, they found that if they terminated the servers, all of the computers infected, would lose their Internet connections. So, in an unusual move, the FBI called in a private company to install two, clean servers which took over the malicious servers to insure hundreds of thousands of computer would continue to have access to the Internet.

But now, those servers are about to be shut down. The shut-down will occur at 12:01 am on July 9th.

The FBI estimates that roughly 277,000 users world-wide, as well as 64,000 computers in the United States are still infected, as are 50 Fortune 500 companies.

Unfortunately, without taking the proper steps, you will not know if you are one of the thousands that will lose your connection on Monday. There may have been hints that your computer was infected. Infected computers would have begun to experience slower Internet speeds than usual.

Many Internet providers have sent notices to their customers and have posted notices online warning of the malicious attack.

Fortunately, there is a simple way to determine if your machine is infected. By simply going to this site, https://www.dcwg.org, you will find out if you are in fact infected. If, after a short scan, the screen shows a green colored background box, your computer has not been affected, however if a red background box appears, your computer has malware on it. If so, the site will direct you to this site, https://www.dcwg.org/fix, where, if you follow the steps indicated, you can rid yourself of the infection.

You can find out more on the threat at this link to the FBI website.