DNSChanger, which has been a headache for users along with Fortune 500 companies, continues to be an issue–at least for 60 of them. With respect to the scheduled shut down of the Trojan’s command-and-control servers on 9 July, the FBI’s action will have Internet darkening results for 12% of Fortune 500 companies and 4% of US government agencies as they have not cleaned their systems yet.

Ever since the DNSChanger hit the systems (back in 2006), more than 500,000 systems got infected, while six Estonians were arrested for running DNSChanger. So, the latest update is that 303,867 IP addresses are still infected, out of which 70,000 are from the U.S. alone. Now, DNSChanger is not hijacking the search results any more, but can still activate the anti-virus aspect of its programming resulting in disabled anti-virus protection on an infected system.

After seizing the IP addresses used by DNSChanger, the FBI has been running the servers as if nothing happened so that people infected could change their settings and move on. However, on July 9, 2012 the FBI will shut down these servers and everyone still infected with this Trojan will suddenly find themselves out in the cold and unable to access web pages.

Back in February, FBI started ‘Operation Ghost Click’ seized more than 100 servers hosted at U.S. data centers in order to replace those servers and allow infected computers to use the Internet. Amid all this chaos, some anonymous threats were also received to take numerous highly trafficked websites offline. Some rumors also spread that FBI may darken the cloud on March 8, but it actually didn’t happen. Here’s an excerpt from the BetaBeat article, which described all scenario:

“The Federal Bureau of Investigation may yank several crucial domain name servers (DNS) offline on March 8, blocking millions from using the Internet. The servers in the FBI’s crosshairs were installed in 2011 to deal with a nasty worm dubbed DNSChanger Trojan. DNSChanger can get an innocent end-user in trouble; it changes an infected system’s DNS settings to shunt Web traffic to unwanted and possibly even illegal sites.”

Besides FBI, Google has also stepped forward to offer a solution in the way that it will spread message through its search engine and would provide the message that they should get themselves fixed. Google is throwing a lot of resources at this, including translators to localize the message across the globe.