Bot Software Spreads, Causes New Worries

2005 has definitely been the year of the bot, bigger and badder than any other year. And since a bot's often delivered by a worm, it fits here, too. Been up to my neck in WMF associated malware the past couple of days, but nothing I saw was a worm (it was all manually driven).

Zombies attack! Bot software sounds a bit like a low-budget horror movie, but it's quietly making trouble and stealing data right now, using millions of PCs worldwide. These malicious pieces of code, often compared to an undercover army of robots, invade a PC and use its computing power to do someone else's dirty work most often without the PC owner's knowledge.

The infected PC, known as a zombie, becomes another node on a bot network, typically 2,000 to 10,000 PCs strong, according to Symantec. Unfortunately, a bot network proves a practical tool for people who want to spread PC viruses and worms, send spam emails, install spyware on PCs, or carry out denial-of-service attacks on particular Web sites.

Technology publications have been buzzing about the bot threat ever since a flavor called Agobot took a fast ride through the Internet in April, finding its way into PCs thanks to a Windows operating system vulnerability. Security experts warn that large networks of Agobot-infected PCs now sit at the ready, waiting for directions. Have the risks been overblown, or do bots deserve special scrutiny?

Source: Bot Software Spreads, Causes New Worries, by Laurianne McLaughlin, in IEEE DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS ONLINE 1541-4922 © 2004 Published by the IEEE Computer Society, Vol. 5, No. 6; June 2004.