The cyber war continues – the zombie battle
Hacker controlled computers- so called zombies - are on the rise and the number of new zombies is increasing rapidly.
The word “Zombie" is used to describe personal computers that are remotely controlled by hackers. They infect your machine by entering through email attachments, specific websites, commercial popups and other techniques. After your machine has been infected the robot will lie silently on the and wait for the command code from the controlling hacker. It is a sleeping robot - a zombie - until someone gives the right signal. Then they will wake up, most likely with hundreds or thousands of other zombies, and perform illegal actions on other computers or systems. For instance it can be used to send thousands of commands to a company with the intention of breaking down its system (Distributed Denial of Service Attack).
The zombies can also collect personal information that can be used for financial fraud later. According to Red Herring, a magazine for business technology, an average of 172 000 persons lose control of their machines every day. The US government is taking the problem seriously and has started to fight back against the computer criminals.
The US Federal Trade Commission has announced that they will start educating Internet Service Providers (ISPs) on anti-zombie techniques. One of the things that the ISPs have to do is to make sure that the customers understand the threats and to provide them with updated zombie-killing software.
The danger with computer zombies is not really the amount of spam that they are sending, but the anonymous platform they create. A platform that can be used for illegal actions.
The best way you can protect yourself from becoming a zombie is to have efficient protection tools installed in your computer. Norman Virus Control uses the best proactive virus solution in the world - Norman SandBox - that is able to detect new and unknown malware. This prevents your computer from getting infected by viruses, trojans or other malicious code. A personal firewall and antispyware will also prevent your computer from becoming a sleeping robot.
A much greater challenge is how to avoid the actual attack from zombies. There is not yet a solution that is able to stop a DDoS attack. A server that is under attack has in fact no means for stopping the attackers or to escape the collapse that will occur. The requests that the robots are sending may be very simple and do not have to harmful at all - if it was just one. That means that there are not (yet) any methods for filtering these requests that will collapse the server under attack.
Until a method for stopping such attacks has been developed, there is only one way to prevent the zombies from performing their attacks: Make sure your own machine does not become a zombie. Use proper protection!!
