This is a good article to read to understand what is out there on the
Internet right now … a whole lot of Zombies! For those of you
that do not know what a zombie is, it is a computer that has been
compromised … hijacked … infected … taken over. In most
cases, this has been done without the owner of the computer even
noticing. In fact … the people who are responsible for creating
these zombies do not want the owners to know, and in most cases do not
want to harm the owner or their data!
Zombie’d computers are platforms for launching a wide range of attacks
on other computers on the Internet. They simply have some little
software processes that are running in the background … most of the
time unnoticed. This software is like a virus, but not to impact
the machine it is running on, but instead to allow a malicious user to
use it to launch various types of attacks on other computers or web
sites.
I have read numerous article that talk about large numbers of zombies
being used to attack gambling sites on the Internet … to shut them
down and extort large sums of money from them.
What is interesting is my experience last week … I set up a new
computer and plugged it into my Internet connection. It was only
booted for less than 30 minutes … and I was downloading the various
security patches and updates … when I noticed a lot of network
activity. After checking my new system, I found three unknown
processes running … and also found that it had hundreds of
connections to other computers all over the planet! In just a
short amount of time on the Internet, my brand new workstation had
become a zombie! I thought about what to do, and ended up
reformatting the hard disk and starting over … no idea what else
might have been compromised on the machine.