At right, you’ll see the Estonian flag. We thought it was modern art, too, but that’s really it, they really wave that at formal Estonian whatevers. It’s not exactly an exciting country. On the other hand, it does apparently have some masterful rip-off artists, because a bunch of Estonian hackers have stolen $14 million through fraudulent advertising online.
It’s actually kind of brilliant: they used a trojan called DNSChanger pretending to be a video codec (one guess what kind of video the infected were trying to watch) to, essentially, take control of all outbound internet traffic on an infected computer, infected millions of computers, and then redirected all the traffic to their servers, making advertisers think they were getting legit clicks and making them millions in supposedly legitimate dollars. And most of the infected didn’t even notice.
Of course, it all fell apart once these things infected U.S. government computers: our government doesn’t take kindly to getting ripped off.
So, you should probably check your IP address with this handy FBI tool to see if you were infected. And if you were, let us know in the comments! We won’t make fun of you for watching dirty movies! Honest!