Malware warning issued to Internet users by local officials

 The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department was one of many law enforcement agencies nationwide warning Internet users about malware that threatened to knock about 64,000 Americans offline Monday.

The threat stems from a temporary fix the FBI used to combat a malware problem that affected more than 4 million computers worldwide. When the FBI went in to shut down the online-advertising scam that caused the malware issues, officials realized that turning off the bad servers would cause infected computers to lose Internet access.

The FBI then set up two other servers to connect infected users to the Internet, but shut down those servers at 12:01 a.m. Monday EDT.

Various agencies have spent the previous weeks warning Americans to check their computers for the DNS Changer Malware. Los Angeles County sheriff's officials shared information from the FBI about the malware on Sunday.

Those who are affected by the outage are advised to call their Internet provider.

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— Kate Mather