Botnets: Are you a Victim of This Spy Network?

Zombies! Can you imagine this word being used for a computer system? A zombie army or a botnet reveals the level of sophistication of hackers and criminals. They have created a network of their own. Your computer is then the target of ad ware, spy ware and spy bots. Are you a victim? The answer is simple: if your internet connection is slow and you are receiving adverts and other pop ups then you are a victim.

What are Botnets?

Botnet is collection of robots. Computers that access the internet and do not have proper security or firewalls are victims. Network security attacks aimed at your PC infect it with a Trojan through an open port and then you become unwitting member of the zombie army. The army controller relays the commands from an Internet Relay channel site. (IRC- A live chat system; Internet Relay Chat allows users to create private discussion rooms).

• A robot or a zombie computer can be programmed to redirect transmission to a specific computer or a specific web site. This results in a distributed denial of service DDoS.
• Robots also forward spam, viruses and Trojans to other computers.

Bots and Robots

What is a bot? Bot is derived from the word robot and is commonly used to describe a program on the internet. It is so named because it interacts with people as though it were a real person. Generally used by web crawlers and spiders on the web. These web robots interface with web pages to gather information. ‘Yahoo bots’, ‘go ogle bot’ are bots that collect information for the search engine. Internet based services are used by some bots and so we have instant messenger bots like AOL bots, AIM bots, MSN bots, IRC bots, yahoo messenger bots chat, msn chat bots, shopping bot, chatter bots (jabber wacky) and many other internet bots, automated retrieval bot software that can download pictures or images. These bots perform useful functions like reporting weather, Sports scores, conversion calculators (currency and other units) even entertain like run escape and smarter child that replies to questions with questions. Run escape bots have recently surfaced that help cheating in online gaming. EBay had tried to suppress a third party that was using bots to look at bargains on its site. This gave bots the publicity and malicious programmers are now making use of bots for fraudulent means.

Continue to : All About Botnets

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