Botnets and zombie PCs
I have often mentioned the problem of criminal rings that have taken over hundreds of thousands of PCs without the owners knowing and are using them for malicious purposes . The problem is sufficiently serious that the front page of today’s New York Times business section has an article, A Robot Network Seeks to Enlist Your Computer. The article begins:
In a windowless room on Microsoft’s campus here, T. J. Campana, a cybercrime investigator, connects an unprotected computer running an early version of Windows XP to the Internet. In about 30 seconds the computer is “owned.”
An automated program lurking on the Internet has remotely taken over the PC and turned it into a “zombie.” That computer and other zombie machines are then assembled into systems called “botnets” — home and business PCs that are hooked together into a vast chain of cyber-robots that do the bidding of automated programs to send the majority of e-mail spam, to illegally seek financial information and to install malicious software on still more PCs.
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