The "94 of all Fortune 500 companies" line makes it sound like nearly one out of five Fortune 500 companies would be crippled if the DNS servers were turned off today. In reality, that statistic just shows those companies have had at least one computer (out of the untold thousands they manage) reach out from a public IP they own and query the malware DNS servers prior to Feb 23rd (not March). This trickle of infected machines are likely old, un-managed workstations, laptops that have been rotting away in a closet until somebody tested to see if they still work, and similar forgotten odds and ends. There is no way that a major company would suddenly go offline, but that is the result implied by this article. Plus, this is just DNS - the infected computer isn't going to completely drop off the internet. If necessary, a company could write a rule at their firewall and route any DNS-Changer traffic to the IP of a legit DNS server.

The FBI article mentions that only about 500,000 computers in the U.S. were infected, but only the 4 million figure for world-wide infections is used for this article. Again, slightly misleading as FBI crime statistics are usually implied to be U.S.-centric. The way the FBI article is worded, it is difficult to determine if they are saying 500k is the PEAK stateside infection count at the height of the outbreak, or a RUNNING count of infected machines over the entire lifetime of the malware. Either way, it is definitely not the CURRENT number of infected machines.

But I'll run with that number as a "worst-case" possibility for a second. 500,000 infected computers in the U.S., out of an estimated 245,000,000 U.S.-based internet users. So - at absolute maximum - there could be 1 in 500 people affected.

Those 1 in 500 have been running without antivirus since being hit with DNS-Changer and are probably infected with several other pieces of malware by now. They need to be taken offline as a public service - to protect them from themselves and keep them from possibly being used to infect others. These bottom 0.2% of internet users likely need to take their computers in for repair anyway to get rid of the 12 IE toolbars they have installed and the multiple versions of fake AV. This will just force them to do so before rejoining the rest of society. July can't come soon enough.

...or I could just be jaded and grumpy today because everyone from my mom to several non-techie co-workers has contacted me and been worried to death about this in the past two weeks. It seems some people still read the local newspaper. The Courier-Journal article that freaked them all out was from April 21st with the friendly headline "HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS MAY LOSE INTERNET IN JULY." I don't know how they could have possibly gotten scared from a headline like that. /sarcasm.