Blog Originally posted on Tuesday, April 15, 2008
In “Attack of the Zombie Computers Is Growing Threat”, John Markoff expresses his concern about how hackers and spammers are turning the average computer into a powerful slave or zombie computers used to launch massive spam emails and commit cyber crimes. How is this possible?
With technology getting better and more complex by the minute, hackers and spammers are taking advantage of it to create powerful tools or viruses to infect computers around the world, turning the infected computers into a “Zombie Army” called Botnets. Botnets are responsible for the recent growth of spam email, data theft. “It’s the perfect crime, both low-risk and high-profit,” said Gadi Evron, a computer security researcher for an Israeli-based firm, Beyond Security. Botnets take advantage of bugs found on Windows based computers. Botnets are written by computer code writers predominantly from Europe, and are later distributed in many ways such as email, user downloads, and pirated software and drive-by downloads. Once the program is installed on an internet connected computer, the computers can be remotely controlled through a communications system called Internet Relay Chat.
As a computer technician, I’ve experienced an infection from a botnet while testing one of my computers for security breaches. The particular file that infected my computer was set up to use Outlook Express to send massive spam email to thousands of random addresses. Once the attack began, I was practically spammed with thousands of emails not making it to their target due to spam filters or simply the addresses not being found.
The success of turning computers into zombies rests in the fact that Windows based computers hold the greatest market share among Operating Systems (NetApplications, 2007). Some people argue that this would be solved by changing to another Operating System; however, this will only be a temporary resolution if everyone decided to change systems out of rampage. If you were a virus writer, what operating system should you make a target? The most used system or the less used system?
Most computer users, who are currently using infected computers, do not even know they are infected due to lack of security. The malicious software being redefined by “black hat” programmers makes it more difficult to detect such infections. What can be done to prevent this from happening to you? Make sure you are protecting your computer with the latest antivirus application, firewall and keep them up-to-date.
John Markoff. (Date January 7, 2007). Attack of the Zombie Computers Is Growing Threat. Retrieved Saturday, May 19, 2007, from http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/07/technology/07net.html?ex=1179720000&en=03ad4d996bf2f05c&ei=5070
Netapplications.com. (ND). Operating System Market Share for April, 2007. Retrieved Saturday, May 26, 2007, from http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=2