The bot wars are on!
Have you ever wondered how all these spammers and phishers never seem to get caught? The answer to that question may be sitting right on your desk or your laptop. I found an alarming article about this subject at MSNBC.com.
The hackers or, more appropriately, crackers have progressed from the simple jokes they have played in the past to commanding entire electronic armies of zombie computers. And with the general public's lack of computer expertise especially in detecting the viruses and Trojan horses that these bot herders use to invade home computers, they have had a really easy making huge profits. The days of hackers hacking into computers just for knowledge has long since past.
I have heard people say that the real problem with all these computers is that 90% of all the computers in the world run the Windows operating system. It has been said that if more computers ran the Mac or Linux OS, that there simply wouldn't be such a problem with hackers. I don't necessarily believe that to be true.
First off, Windows has been the most targetted os in the past simply because it happens to be the dominant operating system in the entire world. It would be exactly the same with any operating system that happened to be used, whether that happened Mac or Linux. These criminals are just like any other in that they always go fro the easiest target to break into. And right now, that happens to be Windows.
Hackers gain control of these zombie computers and then lease their networks to others for huge profits totalling in the thousands every day. These bot networks are then used for spam adn denial-of-service attacks. With as many as 100,000 zombie computers on one network, it would be easy for these individuals to get past spam filters by sending as little as one message a day from each computer on that network.That could be well into the billions of messages a day.
It used to be that you could detect these viruses and Trojan when your system was running slow and with some old computers, this is still true. Newer computers, on the other hand, have so much power that most users would not notice a difference in how their computer is performing.
Their ways of attracting business are still the old fashioned way, by waging wars over the internet to gain control of a rival's network to show that they are number one. The amount they are payed pales in comparison to how much money the people they are spamming for can possibly make. I guess that even in the electronic world, the almighty dollar rules all. This should be obvious since most spam emails are sent from the U.S.
posted by speeddemon0117 @ 3:00 AM
2 Comments:
Thought provoking articles you have here. I suppose we can do little about it except to hope that the anti-virus and spyware companies do a good job of updating their softwares.
Yes, but hackers always seem to find ways to get through the software.
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