Bangalore: If you visited sites like Amazon.com, or the Wall Street Journal’s website and saw or clicked ads on them last year, be warned-- your internet connection might go out of existence in July this year.

The FBI is warning hundreds of thousands of people about a malware released late last year to DNS servers that redirected users to advertising websites and required users to pay for the ads they saw and clicked. The ring of cyber-criminals behind the malware earned about $14 million in illegitimate income, according to the FBI’s report.

The FBI report said that few of the examples of ‘Click hijacking’ and ‘Advertisement Replacement Fraud’ that the malware perpetrated affected visitors to a number of leading websites such as Apple, The Wall Street Journal, the ESPN website, Netflix, Amazon.com etc.  Victims who went to the Apple website, for example, were taken to an unaffiliated website that posed to sell Apple software when they clicked on the domain name link for the official Apple i-Tunes software. DNS Servers help you to go to particular addresses but the malware DNSChanger took victims to a cybercrime ring’s servers instead of websites they wanted to visit.

The malware affected about 4 million computers in about 100 countries worldwide. Last year, the FBI caught six of the seven cyber-criminals involved in the malware attack that was first discovered in 2007, and re-routed the infected computers to temporary, properly functioning servers in March this year, but these servers will be shut down on July 9, 2012.

Although the victims of this attack were expected to clean their systems of the infection by July, the malware affected the installation of anti-virus software and prevented the systems from receiving operating system updates, which makes the task even harder than expected.

But the DNSChanging Group which was set up to oversee the servers has set up a website to help you diagnose your computer and disinfect it, if necessary.