AlanBarber.Org
Saturday, April 23, 2005
The growing zombie computer problem in Asia
I saw a rather interesting article at IT World about the growing number of zombie systems popping up in China.
Zombie is the term for a computer that has been infected with a Trojan horse program that hackers can control. It allows the hackers to take control of a computer so it can be used as part of a DDOS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack or send spam messages. The main point being that the owner/user of the computer is completely unaware that their computer has been compromised.
Here’s the quote that blows me away
“An average of 157,000 new zombies are identified each day, and 20 percent of these are in China, security company CipherTrust Inc. reported this week.”
One hundred and fifty thousand!?!? That drives me nuts! It’s a sheer lack of common sense and stupidly that allows numbers like that to get infected every day.
Come on people! Get your heads together and realize that owning a computer and being connected to the Internet is dangerous. You have to take care of your computers. Get virus protection and USE IT! Download and install system patches and updates OFTEN! If you use Windows XP download and install Service Pack 2 and let it set itself to automatically download and install system updates for you.
Do these things not just for yourself but for the global population. Your lack of action can cause real harm to other people.
on 04/23/2005 at 04:12 PM