DNSChanger: By the Numbers

Over the past week or two, we've been following the DNSChanger or "Internet Doomsday" saga as the final day approached – today – and now it's time to take a head count for what's actually happened. Despite the name, this doomsday didn't actually affect very many computers at all. In fact, according the the folks at DCWG and their study of the infection over the last couple of years, we'd just reached the lowest number of infections per DNS Top Level Domain Country Code in the history of the virus.

The number of unique IP addresses DCWG found with the DNSChanger infection was 551,436 back on the 8th of November, 2011. Fast forward to yesterday (the 8th of July, 2012,) and the number had dropped to 210,851. According to country code, the USA returned the most hits for IPs with the infection at 41,557 just yesterday while only Italy, Great Britain, and Germany had over 10,000 racked up.

There will be monitoring of IP addresses that have been affected and subsequently claimed clean, of course, to make sure they aren't hijacked once more. The DCWG's job does not end here, but the IP addresses listed at their site: Cleaning Ends will now be monitored by several Service Provider and Security Organizations – that's what's included in the future checking to assure no more malicious hijacking.

And in the end, if you're reading this from your computer connected to the internet, you weren't infected anyway. So happy day for you! Have a peek at our timeline below to follow the whole saga as it unfolded this summer – and stay tuned for more!