What is a Botnet?
Usually one, or a few, people combine forces to write a virus or Trojan horse, sometimes installing a backdoor onto your computer. When starting your computer and connecting to the internet the following happens:
- The malware is activated
- A 'bot' signs in to a network, you can compare it to a chatroom. This chatroom, and all 'bots' signing in are 'controlled' by the creator of the malware.
- After enough bots have signed in the 'administrator' of the room can use the bots for any purpose without you noticing, untill you get a abuse-message from your Internet Service Provider (ISP) warning or banning you
This way the creator of the virus or trojan horse can do anything, but mostly the compromised machines, zombies are used to:
- Infect more people, adding more zombies to the botnet
- Send massive ammounts of spam
- Attack another computer or server for DDoS purposes
What can I do against my computer being compromised? Well, as you can read in most of the articles, good virus protection and a good firewall are essential and keep all programs and your operating-system up-to-date so minimum risk is involved. Secondly, when you notice a lot of internet activity and neither your firewall, nor your antivirus program ahs warned you about anything, something might be wrong. Check tos ee if you haven't got a download or upload going on, when you don't go here.