Hank [BS/MSEE,
MSM $$$, Ph.D. Mgmt] teaches 
It is estimated than more than 50 million PCs around the world are now silently controlled by spammers and criminal gangs. These “zombie” PCs as they are called, are just normal PCs owned by Moms and Pops that have been taken over by malware secretly downloaded onto the PCs using web exploits, infected emails and more. And it’s going to get worse!
These zombies are organized in vast networks called botnets with each botnet owned and controlled remotely by different criminal groups. The most common use of botnets is sending spam.
Most zombie owners don’t even know their PC is under the control of someone else. That’s where this program from Trend Micro [I have NO affiliation with them.] is useful:
“RUBotted is a free program that monitors your computer for suspicious activities and regularly checks with an online service to identify behavior associated with Bots. Upon discovering a potential infection, RUBotted prompts you to scan and clean your computer.” You can download it at the following link:
http://www.trendsecure.com/portal/en-US/tools/security_tools/rubotted
If your Norton [God bless you] or other virus-related subscription has expired and/or was not installed, Trend Micro has a nifty online scan that I have used when I ran Rapid Computer Systems that can be of great help. It’s called “Housecall,” and conducts an online scan. It’s available here: Entrepreneurs and anti-entrepreneur tools. Hank
I completely agree that the computer threats are increasing by every single moment in today’s generation. The time is running ahead of us and still fighting with the word ‘Spam’ is a caheelenge for us. The major step we shoud take intially is to male people (moms and pops) whose PCs are prone to be called Zombie PCs should be warned agaisnt this threats, as sometimes they themselves invite spammers and criminal gang by not keeping their protection to guard privacy and online security up-to-date. I have heard of all the major software company giving the ‘Spam blocker tips’ along with their software package, but that is mostly very limited. Also, no private ‘Spam slammer’ works 100% perfect to block iworms or nfections from entering your body. In this case ‘Trend micro’ seems to me as a good vaccination for our PCs for this kind of harmful viruses.
I looked into its website and saw that it has many other useful things to offer along with ‘RUBotted’. It has protective options for everykind of users like casual ones as well as the professional ones. It also tell you the threat leve lon your PCs and can give you free botnet roprts as well. I believe this is something important as well as intersting to know about so we can move a step forward to kill the Zombies. Thanks Hank for this very useful information!
Yea now that internet is coming to be more of another way of life. Hackers and botnets are just new-age crimes that people need to know about. Its not like your traditional steal your purse tactic while walking down the street. I know there are hackers out there that use fraud to get quick money but there are some that are in comparison to someone who blows up mailboxes or something of that nature just to create a disaster.
http://archives.cnn.com/2000/TECH/computing/04/19/dos.investigation/index.html
I saw this article about a teenage boy who was boasting about how he caused a distributed denial of service attack to global websites like google and yahoo. I didnt even know what that meant but i knew it was no good…
I just finish running the HouseCall on my computer and it found over 60 plus spyware worms and pop-up features embedded in my computer! I really appreciate the fact that I performed this “debugging” free! Thanks Hank!
This is a very helpful program that I had no idea existed and to be quite honest wasn’t really aware of the problem of bots had gotten so huge. Luckily I didn’t have any bots but had I known about this program a year ago maybe I’d still have my other computer before it crashed and turned trash. Definitely a program that I’ll keep on my list to make sure my pc is optimized. Thanks Hank!
Norton is far better than McAfee at least from a performance standpoint. McAfee has the disgusting attribute of slowing my PC to a snail when its doing its periodic scans.
Spy bot search-and destroy is another useful program as well as ad-ware. I recommend people clean out there internet cookies and run a regular full scan of your computer.
http://archives.cnn.com/2000/TECH/computing/04/19/dos.investigation/index.html
Since the internet is becoming a way of life, security is very very important since billions of transactions are done on the web. With the internet becoming so essential to peoples daily lives a big problem will be those who try an use it to take advantage of others, whether it be by stealing identities or using fraud for another method of robbery.
I was reading up on cnn.com an saw an example of how even the youth are smart enough to find ways to harm websites usage. A 13 year old canadian boy managed mount a distributed denial of service attack to various sites affecting global websites and search engines like google and yahoo.
I think programs like this need to be more well known. I know I have Norton on my computer and I assume it to be doing its job, but I don’t take enough time to look into new programs that could be respond to newer threats better. Are the automatic updates on my Norton software good enough where I shouldn’t expect any brand new threats on my computer?
Another useful program for anti-virus is AVG. I like it for it relatively small footprint on the computer.
The botnets are actually some pretty interesting stuff. At one point in time (i am not sure if it still is) it was believed that the storm worm botnet was the largest super computer in the world with an estimated 1 to 10 petabytes of ram it had from infected computers. For people that arent computer people 1 petabyte is 1,048,576 gigabytes.
That’s pretty nifty, and alarming facts about the large amount of computers under remote control. Anymore nowadays you have to be careful of what you download, but more importantly from where - the internet is a big place. I like to try to read product reviews and blog postings on things before I download new software or send out critical information over the internet.
I have never had a virus, any spyware or any other malicious software on my computer. I have a Mac, and for the time being, that is quite enough. Its user base is not big enough for people to write viruses for. It has had multiple Proof-of-concept viruses, but no actual virus (and most if not all of the PoCs required non-default settings to do any serious damage).
When I finally do get hit with a virus (lets be honest, its only a matter of time), I will probably jump off the OSX ship and on to some other niche OS, seems to be the best method of protection. Just remember to back up your important “stuff”, I am sure hank knows of about 100 places that offer free web storage…
Jim
Jim,
If you could really say that you never had malware/spyware on your computer, then you would probably get the Turing Award (Nobel Prize for Computer Science). Nobody can make the assertion that their system is free of malware/spyware. Saying this is analogous to saying that a computer program is completely free of errors–software engineering tells us we can never make this assertion.
In today’s world, it is more than important to emphasize the need of security on computers as more and more people are doing online transactions and storing private information. Technologically unaware people need to be made aware of the problems of spam as a lot of people don’t have any clue as to what they are. As more and more people get aware of spam, I am pretty sure they’ll start taking precautions. At last, spam is spreading like HIV. It needs the same attention and publicity as HIV.
I periodically run Spybot and Ad-Aware on my computer to check for unwanted bots. I tried a little experiment. I ran both Spybot and Ad-Aware scans on my computer. Neither of them detected any bots. I wanted to see if RUBotted would pick anything else up, so I installed it as well. RUBotted did not detect any bots on my computer either.
I do a couple of things to actively protect my computer. First, I use Firefox browser, which is known to be less susceptible to attacks than IE. This may only be because of the niche market, I can’t say for sure. The second thing I do is have Firefox delete all of my private data every time I close the browser. This includes the cache, cookies, history, everything. Since using this setting, I rarely detect any bots when I scan with Spybot or Ad-Aware. I definitely recommend this method.
I disagree with Nwokedis analogy, while no one can ever be sure if a software program is free of bugs, which are unintentional, malware is highly intentional, and is designed to cause harm. It can easily be identified by its heuristics.
Services like this are great for inexperienced users, as they put that important characteristic of Malware to use.
I feel that the world of cyber space is getting more threatening and more safe at the same time. I think that with the invention of new viruses, people being able to retrieve your personal information and so on, it is getting more and more complicated to protect yourself from anything cyber related. It seems like in these days when everything is becoming computerized, no one is safe and no one has no choice but to put their information out there for the world to see or at least have the potential to see. As we learn how to deal with these problems and potential threats, it is too late. There is already something new out there that does 10x’s more damage or harm.
It’s funny how common malware is. I work at Ivy tech for one of the computer administrators and I see this crap on people’s computers all the time because they aren’t smart enough to prevent it. In fact, last week I saw an employees computer that was so full of them that it was sucking all of the computer’s resources. One thing people can do is download Microsoft Defender. Please don’t install crap like Weatherbug! Also, just be aware of what you’re downloading. It amazes me how people just assume every program or download is safe.
I think that this is very informative. I have used house call, a program called clean-up, and Spybot search and destroy when fixing other people’s computers. I hope to see more things out here that inform people more about threats that are out here.