Botnets Attack!
November 23, 2009 — sekim13
Today in class, we watched a video on how computers get infected and about viruses and botnets. A botnet is a group of computers that use the same application that is controlled by the owner or the software creator. Once the robot software has been successfully installed in a computer, this computer becomes a zombie or a drone, unable to resist the commands of the bot commander. Usually, the owners of the computers do not even know that their computers and their computers’ resources are being remotely controlled and exploited by an individual or a group of people. What a botnet does is it can send out hundreds of thousands of spam mail using the computers that they control. If the spam can hook at least one or two of the people that it is sent to, then they have succeeded because then they will get their information or the money that they want.
Another thing that you can control botnets to do is to shut down an entire website. What people that control the botnets do is order all the botnets to go to a certain website. When/if a website has too many people at one certain time, it ends up shutting down and beocming unavailable and people cannot acces that site.
There are ways, however, to try and prevent these outcomes. You can set up firewalls to protect your computer from viruses and botnets. You must always be careful with computers. Humans aren’t the only ones that get sick. Computers can get sick too. The only problems with computer viruses nowadays is that an infected computer will have no symptoms.
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