David Dittrich of SearchSecurity.com writes:

Miscreants are hijacking and linking thousands of compromised computers, called botnets, to launch coordinated attacks. Large enterprises may have hundreds of compromised hosts being used by a single attacker. And numerous attackers are likely using multiple sets of computers. Defending against botnet attacks is challenging and complex. Here are five practical steps for identifying and ridding your network of bot infection.

Bots (short for “robot[s]“) are programs that listen and respond to commands on Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channels. A group of bots acting in concert forms a botnet. Bots can be found running on any OS, although they are more commonly found on computers running Windows….

[Continue reading Five Steps For Beating Back The Bots]

A bot is common parlance on the Internet for a software program that is a software agent. Bots interact with other network services intended for people as if it was a real person. One typical use of bots is to gather information. The term is derived from the word “robot,” reflecting the autonomous character in the “virtual robot”-ness of the concept.

The most common bots are Web agents that interface with Web pages. Web crawlers or spiders are Web robots that recursively gather Web page information, such as the bot used by Google (”GoogleBot”). They may also be used to interact dynamically with a site in a particular way, for example to exploit or locate arbitrage opportunities for financial gain.

Some bots communicate with other users of Internet based services, for example via IM or IRC, or another web interface. These chatterbots may allow people to ask questions in plain English and then formulate a proper response. These bots can often handle many tasks including reporting weather, zip code information, sports scores, converting currency or other units, and much more. Others just want to entertain us or learn from us, like Jabberwacky. [Encyclopedia Lockergnome]