A Botnet is a group of infected computers or devices called “bots” or “zombies” that have a virus or malware, allowing cybercriminals to secretly take control of the devices. The people who own these infected devices usually have no idea that their computers are being used as a Botnet.
How Are Botnets Used?
Botnets are use for several harmful activities, including:
- Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Attack: Used to send huge amounts of traffic (data) to a website or server, overwhelming it so that it crashes or becomes too slow for people to use. It’s like trying to call a company what has a cue waiting system in place, the more callers in the cue, the longer it takes to get through. Sometimes the system is overwhelmed by a vast amount of callers and crashes.
- Phishing Emails: cyber criminals send out millions of spam or scam emails. These emails might try to trick people into clicking harmful links or downloading malware. Sometimes the links lead to an official looking website, trying to collect your details. Usually the only buttons that will work on those particular sites, are the ones programmed by the attackers.
- Mining Cryptocurrency: Many know this as Bitcoin, but cryptocurrency has many names. Criminals use Botnets to secretly tell infected devices perform complex calculations to create the cryptocurrency, also known as mining. The reason for this? Mining requires a lot of energy, this can often be costly. Cyber criminals using these systems to minimise the power they use and maximise the productivity of performing the complex calculations.
- Stealing data: A Botnet can be used to gather personal information from infected computers, like credit card numbers, steal passwords, or private documents. They then try to login into people’s accounts (like email or social media) by using stolen usernames and passwords.
Botnets, Can Be Stopped?
Botnets are made up of computers or devices from all over the world, its very hard to find and stop them. People usually don’t realise their device is part of a botnet because it still works normally most of the time. Security software and firewalls can help prevent.
Protect yourself
If you think that your system may be infected with a Botnet, run an ant-malware scan to detect the software. Good malware detection stops it before it is installed on your devices, but certain uncommon zero-day malware can remain undetected as it not commonly use. To project against this, always keep your security updated, especially your anti-malware software.