Zombies and Botnets

A zombie computer, usually known in the short form zombie, is a computer attached to the Internet that has been compromised and manipulated without the knowledge of the computer owner. A botnet refers to a network of zombie computers that have been taken over and put under the remote control of an attacker.

A botnet might consist of thousands of zombie computers, and even more. The zombie computers in the botnets can consist of computers at homes, schools, businesses and governments scattered around the world.

A zombie computer itself may only be slowed down slightly, or displaying mysterious messages. However, the whole botnet can be used by the attacker for a massive attack, such as DDoS (the Distributed Denial of Service) attack, against another system or network. Due to the large number of machines in a botnet, the aggregate computing power can be enormous when all these machines work together to launch a DDoS attack against a single target.

You should protect your machines or systems from becoming zombie computers.