About Botnets and their threats

A Botnet can be described as a collection of PCs infected with a
computer worm, which puts the system under the worm creator’s
control without the owner’s knowledge.

The infected PC isn’t destroyed as is the case with a malicious virus, instead the PC is used for criminal acts such as sending out spam, the launch of distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDoS) and hosting of illegal web content such as child pornography.

Again organised crime is behind this, with the control of a large network of compromised computers being a very valuable asset. It’s scary to note that many users out there are unaware of being under a Botnet’s control. One Botnet was found to have 1 500 000 computers under its control.

Botnets use spam and email to get their trojans, viruses, worms and vulnerabilities to spread, but instant messaging (MSN, Skype, Yahoo! Messenger) can be one of the fastest ways in which you can get infected. A link pops up on screen with a simple message saying something to the effect of “Here, look at these pictures of me”. The link is actually an infected file, and once clicked it installs on your PC. Be very wary of just accepting anyone as a friend and especially on clicking on any of the links they send you. Also, don’t install software off the ­internet unless you’re 100% sure that its trusted. The Anti-virus software you have installed on your PC should also be kept up to date to protect against the latest infections, incase your PC does get infected.

Fortunately, writing a Bot is an extremely tedious task that takes a lot of in-depth programming knowledge. This means not everyone can become a Botmaster overnight, despite the obvious financial advantages that they enjoy with their ­malware. However, more recently we saw one of the first attempts at creating an automated Bot creation tool to be used in conjunction with the popular social media service Twitter.

Security Question

How often should the computer be set to scan for viruses? – Jean

Since there are 2500 viruses release everyday it’s important to keep your virus database up to date by setting it to update everyday. The same applies to scanning your PC for viruses. Best practice would be to do a full scan everyday, or if that’s not possible at least a fast scan to monitor your system.

For this question Jean will be receiving BitDefender ­Internet Security 2010.