Well if this it really was stuxnet then I should revise my previous post.
A virus went around awhile ago that routed traffic through a US Govt DNS. They recently turned this server off. It isn't really a conspiracy, more of a cyberweapon gone awry. There is no firewall or any thing like that. They simply turned some DNS servers off.
I don't think this DNS changer is stuxnet though.
aye, we're definitely talking about two different incidences. I'm going to reply as I orginally would have before I gave this some more thought.
The DNS Changer Virus (actually a few different viruses, TDSS, TidServ, and a few other names) was detected over a year ago and at its peak was estimated to infect roughly 3 million PCs globally. The group that wrote them was busted back in Nov of 2011. Since then, the FBI took down the rogue DNS servers and a court order was given to ISC to replace them with their own as it was more effective than trying to reach every victem (which is a down right pain in the ass). From a technical aspect this is not as complicated as it would sound. Since the FBI had bustd the group they had access to all information relevant to the virus and its network. To fix it the ICS simply took over ownership of the DNS IP addresses that any infected computers would be pointed to. So instead of an infeced computer going to a spam or adware site(which was about all this thing was reported to be doing), they would instead continue on to the correct IP address seemlessly.
Between then and now many antivirus makers had added detection of dns changing variants. The concern came recently when the court order to have ICS operate the band-aid DNS servers expired. At that point it was estimatd roughly 300k PCs globally were still infected. A very small number in comparison to the number expected to be infected with much nastier things. When the band-aid servers were taken down on the 9th a very small number of computer users would then find that they were not able to access any websites. Odds are pretty high that these last computers would likely be infected with all sorts of crap anyhows.(my humble opinion)
Stuxnet on the other hand, that's a whole other monster. What was orginally reported as some 'unknown' origin, nasty 'worm' that was attempting to sabotage very specific hardware in Iran was later found to be of government origin. The consiracy part comes into play in that the media first started reporting on it in a light that would make an Internt Kill Switch be a viable method for the government (then thought to not be involved) to stop such a threat. And the story continues with it, in the now known Flame trojan....
-=After Reading=-
After reading more on the DNS changer, I can see where the suspicion comes from. It would appear on the surface that the FBI could have been testing its capabilities in directing internet traffic to where ever it wants. I have a hard time with that because they would not need to risk putting the virus out there. Where it can be known and machines can be secured against it. They could already do that without using some bogus shell company to bust and then later having another agency setup the DNS servers that the FBI would have to have had already in place if the conspiracy was true. We could probably debate more on the topic, but that seems the most obvious reason to me.
