Botnets - What Are They?

For the past several months I have been reading in trade magazines and also online articles about botnets. And I had a general idea about how the bad guys were using these Trojan Horses to attack our computer systems. But I never really knew just how bad the situation has gotten so I thought I would share what botnets are and the problems we all face from them.

A botnets is a Trojan Horse virus that unloads its payload onto unsuspecting computers, usually on computer systems that are not well protected. Estimates I have read say there are about four to five million computer systems that have been compromised and that are currently under the control of cyber criminals.

These armies of compromised computers are behind such plagues as spam, phishing, and denial of service attacks. More recently, the bad guys have been using botnets to boost Web advertising billings by automatically clicking on Internet ads, a practice known as click fraud. In addition, these botnets can also provide the criminals with easy access to identifying information on the victim’s computer as well as infecting the system with adware, for which they are also paid. And the compromised computers can be used to send spam from the victim’s computer as well.

The bad news. Security companies as well as Microsoft indicate there is little they can currently do to stop this type of criminal behavior. It is important for all of us to protect our systems, which in turn will help to keep other systems protected.

[tags]botnets, criminals, computers, security, microsoft, fraud, click fraud[/tags]