Some Tips To Help You Know If Your Computer Has a Botnet Or Not
Sunday, July 11th, 2010When many computers have been hacked to turn them into zombies computers, we call such a group a Botnet. Those computers are being used by cyber criminals to send spam emails and/or to attack websites. These botnets are created by ‘bots’, malicious programs that turn individual computers into ‘zombies’ which can be remotely controlled by the attacker via a ‘bot-herder’ command and control server. Botnets are one of the more dangerous types of menace which occur in cyberspace, as they can harm whole networks as well as individual computers. Problems like viruses, malware, spyware can also be distributed via those Botnets, besides all the spam emails. Denial of Service (DoS) and Distributed Denial of Service (DDos) are 2 others popular methods to hurt servers that hackers are doing with those Botnets. They will try to massively overload a system so it won’t work anymore because there are too many requests to acceessit at once. Here computer repair service you can find a great online service ready to repair any problems your PC may have.
Botnets enter user systems via Trojans or viruses which carry the botnet’s code as the payload. Any of those spam emails you do receive can lead to some trojan or virus ready to infect your PC. If you go to some fake websites telling you to install a fake codec (and not a good video or audio one), it might be a way to infect your PC. Once it is part of yur PC, the Botnet program will communicate with its bot-herder server to wait for more instructions. Such instructions might include to start sending lots of spam emails, or to attack a remote website or server, or simply to propagate the Botnet to others PCs. Most PC users will not even remark that they have a Botnet unto their computer and thus none of the previous activities will be easily detected. So to detect such a threat is very important. This site virus removal guides has good infos about spyware removal, while this one virus removal has everything you should know about virus removal.
The first sign that your computer is infected with a botnet is the inevitable slowing down of your computer. If you do notice that your internet connection is not as fast as before, think that the Botnet is using lots of bandwith to achieve its malicious goals. Other signs you might be infected are if your browser is not working as before, or if your hard disk is always losing space without you knowing why. In other words, your browser will close unexpectedly, its homepage will be irreversibly changed, and your desktop will be inexplicably changed.
