A recent BBC news network article titled, "FBI tries to fight zombie hordes" may catch our interest simply out of pure curiosity. However, fans of "Night of the Living Dead" will be disappointed as these "zombies" are not the shambling corpse type. Rather these zombies might very well be sitting on your desk at home or in your dorm room, and you may not even know it, in the form of your computer.
Zombie is the term used to refer to a computer that has been hijacked by a bot network. In this case a "bot" is a computer program used by hackers who take control of your computer. Often this is done very subtly, with countless numbers of computers being used in large "zombie" networks often without the computer's owners even knowing their computer is being used.
As the news report mentioned, "The law enforcement organization (sic) said that part of the operation involved notifying people who owned PCs it knew were part of zombie or bot networks." In this way law enforcement could try to track these networks back to their original source and apprehend the actual hacker who is behind the crimes.
The report goes on to explain that often times people have no idea their computers are being used this way when the FBI contacts them, and that those computers could have been infected not only by opening e-mail attachments with viruses, but also something as simple as accidentally "visiting a booby-trapped webpage." According to the article even innocent uninvolved Web sites can be hijacked and used to spread destructive programs by being forced by hijackers to serve as unwilling hosts.
In today's increasingly technologically filled world we need to be aware of the risks to ourselves and our computers. It turns out that as technology becomes more complex, criminals find more and more ways to abuse that technology to their advantage and to our disadvantage. For example, a computer that is subverted into one of these zombie networks could be used to send out spam, trojans, viruses, illegal pirated movies or illegal pornography, not to mention identity theft where thieves can use our identity and money to make purchases and leave us footing the expensive bill.
As students we use computer technology everyday, often for class work and for fun, without realizing the real dangers of the larger Internet world. Of course, we aren't completely defenseless, thanks to things like the protective firewalls Ball State University uses and free anti-virus programs that are available from our campus Web site. However, even these may not always be enough.
We ourselves as users of that technology need to be aware of the risks we take and try to be aware of threats to our computers and ourselves in the form of identity theft. Some things the BBC article mentioned that could be signs of your computer being infected are, "if the machine ran slowly, had an e-mail outbox full of mail a user did not send or they get e-mail saying they are sending spam."
Only by being aware and vigilant with our computers can we hope to avoid the real risks our rising technology brings to us.
Read More
Three Air Jam teams take home the win
October 12, 2012Nineteen teams shimmied, shook and flipped for a sold out John R. Emens Auditorium on Thursday night during the 25th annual Air Jam.
Bill Clinton Speaks at North Central High School
October 12, 2012Former President's Speech Could Have Effect on State Senate Race
