Botnet is a number of internet computers that has been set up to transmit hostile data including spam and virus to other computer, and the owners of those computers are unaware of it most of the time. According to Kaspersky Labs, botnets should not be categorized as spam, viruses, or worms but it is considered the biggest threat to the internet.
Some common attacks from botnet
Denial-of-service is definitely one of the most common botnet attacks. Denial service is caused when the website can not handle too much traffic and is forced to close down. The computers that form a botnet can be programmed to redirect transmissions to a specific computer and conduct such attack.
Common hacked victims
Computers that are hacked to serve in a bonet are often those with weak security protection. For example, the owners of those computers fail to provide effective firewalls and other safeguard. Also, home users with weak safeguard tend to be the favor victims of botnet attack because those home users are high speed connections for computers, and if they are under control by botnet, transmission of hostile data can be very efficient and the attacked.
Source:
http://www.dodbuzz.com/2009/08/03/botnets-biggest-cyber-threat/
Hey buddy :
ReplyDeleteSorry for the posting comments short late. Your topic is pretty interesting on me. I never heart Botnet in my life until you mention it here. I just feel like if this kind of
“ virus" was effecting on our computer. It is gonna be a disaster for us. And I google up the Denial -of - service, it is a quite famous case in computer history. I think for the normal computer users like us, the only important thing is to keep track our update on time. As we known, it is good for our computer information security. BTW well done !
Hi!
ReplyDeleteSo when I was looking at your post I was wondering what exactly is a botnet and lo and behold you answered my question in the very first paragraph.
I also loved the image you chose. Your post is a nice general view of botnets but if you ever expand on this topic I would love to read more about how people can get hacked and how are they used exactly.
I would also like to find out about how much control does the hacker have on the computer and are the computer users aware that they are hacked in such a manner? If they are aware why can they not disconnect from the internet so the computer cannot be used in DDOS attack. (In the article you linked they called it distributed denial of service.)
Thanks for the great post; it certainly has piqued my curiosity.