Rise of the Botnets

Country IP Blocks is reporting a dramatic increase in Botnet activity during the first two weeks of April as compared to the first quarter of 2008. Botnet activity and associated spam is up 500% in April and is expected to grow significantly over the next several months.

Botnets generally infect user machines through viruses and worms sent through emails. Once infected, the system morphs into a zombie system awakening whenever the Bot-master sends a series of commands through IRC or webservers. The zombie responds to these commands and becomes a malicious tool, sending spam, viruses, stealing passwords and other sensitive information and becoming involved in denial of service attacks.

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The author forgot to mention boot-to-restore and image restoration as anti-dote for botnets.
Always the classical advices as nothing else exists.

 

Actually the author was planning on including items just like that as well as Virtual Machines...but, it makes for a very long blog. Wait for the second half.