How Zombie Computers Work

scary thing on the web, the zombie computer. Yeah, so if your screen starts displaying that over and over again, you know you've got a problem. Well, first of all, we should probably tell you zombie computers is kind of a it's it's a term that the media sort of invented to describe something that the tech world usually refers to as a bot uh, And a collection of these is called a button net. Now, in the media terms, it's an army of zombie computers, which you can imagine

sounds a little more interesting than a bot net. But saying yes, yes, it definitely definitely gets the the issues off the news stand. But so what is a button net or or a zombie computer? Uh, it's technically it's it's it could be any computer at all. But it's a computer that a hacker has gained access to remotely and can control remotely. Now ideally for the hacker, uh, he or she can do this without the computer's owner

being aware of what's going on at all. So your computer could be a zombie computer, it could be a butt and you might not even be aware of it. Yeah. Actually that's ideal for the hacker because, uh, if you have a machine that they are taking advantage of, if you can detect the fact that it's being used as a zombie computer, then you're going to do something to get rid of that. So they wanted as undetectable and as quiet as possible so that they can continue to

use your your machine now. Um. One of the more recent and uh in my opinion, scarier UH tactics that are actually that's a trojan horse program called the storm worm UM and it's sort of made headlines, but it sort of hasn't um because they're they're they're so under the radar, uh with all their their work that they really haven't Whoever is behind the stormworm has escaped a

lot of public notice. It's not like a lot of the famous viruses of the past, right, and and just so you know, that's really the way hackers usually get get access to your computer. It's it's by tricking you into downloading and executing a file that is a form of computer virus UH, usually a trojan horse program UM. So you download the program, you execute it, and it executes some some code on your computer that allows the hacker to get back door access to your your operating system.

The real problem with this, of course, is that if they do it, well, you don't know, and if you're not really if you're not really aware this sort of thing, you might just think you've got a bad file. You know, you tried to execute something someone said, oh, there's a great slideshow of pictures on here, and you click on it, nothing happens. You might just think, oh, you know, the code gout got a compromise in some way, Well forget it. It It probably wasn't worth looking at, and you go

on your married little way. Meanwhile, your computer is doing all sorts of nasty things, and this can include everything from sending out spam mail to two dozens of people to UH to something that is called a distributed denial of service attack. Now that that's something that goes across an entire network of zombie computers or a bot net, and it's it's an interesting tactic. It's it's a sabotage tactic.

It's when a hacker decides to try and take down a website or a web server of a particular individual, corporation, or organization UM by overloading it. So you tell your army of computers that you've hacked into to all say and messages to this one particular web server, and then next thing you know, that web server gets overloaded with requests and crashes. And there have been some really big, big story uh stories of this, like CNN has been hit by this, Microsoft has been hit by this. Yahoo.

Just because you are a big presence on the web, and you might even have great Internet security, it doesn't mean you're immune to this kind of attack. You know. The funny thing is that in order to take advantage of a computer system, a hacker has to exploit a vulnerability UM And basically what that means is somewhere in the code that operates your computer there is a hole and they are taking advantage of it. But really the biggest vulnerability with all of these zombie computer viruses that

the trojan horses. They require you to install that program, so you are the biggest vulnerability. So as long as you educate yourself and don't launch strange files, own open emails from people you don't know, you have a much better chance of keeping your computer from joining the ranks of the zombies. Right. And should you actually get infected, that's not so good. You may have to actually completely reform at your entire computer, So announce of prevention guys. Anyway,

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