April 11, 2008

Zombies a treat to security

It is estimated that there are thousands of zombie computers out there all churning out spam and other nice stuff in an attempt to either gain the personal details of unwitting computer users, or in some cases they try to hijack traffic from websites and more worrying for the authorities is the attacking of government websites.

It is hard to say exactly how zombies are out there, but a general figure is that there could be hundreds of thousands of these machines and they are being named by the security agencies as a serious threat to our way of life.

This is a serious matter because things could get out of hand, one the hand many of these botnet groups are mere criminals, but they are being tagged as terrorists. Although there are some specialised groups which do just go after government facilities, we need to separate the two before all hackers are classed as a threat.

Source [Wired]