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Night of the Living CPUs

October 28, 2005 on 10:54 am | In IdBlog, Tools | Add a Comment

I guess you can file this one under misuse of tools: the growth of zombified computers. Evan Ratliff’s excellent piece in the New Yorker October 10 delves into this net phenomena and the steps being taken to counteract it.

Zombies, in case you don’t know, are computers hijacked by hackers to do their bidding. In a new wrinkle, the hijackers are organizing slaved CPUs into massive denial of service attacks on specific businesses. The unlucky business owner then gets an email request for $5,000, $10,000 or $20,000 to make the attacks stop. Many of them pay the extortionists because the cost of fending off the attacks is so high.

Any computer with an always-on connection is at risk. Signs that your CPU has been enslaved include a general sluggishness of operation, especially while online, operation at odd hours and high bandwidth usage.

If you haven’t done so already, you can take the following steps to protect your computer:

• Firewall your router and PC. Free firewalls can be found at www.free-firewall.org
• Make sure your antivirus software is up to date and running
• Backup everything
• Sweep your computer with antispyware.

In this category, Lavasoft’s Ad-aware does a good job of eliminating superflous programs and bots. Spybot is another tool to fight the good fight. For Windows users, Ashampoo’s WinOptimizer cleans megabytes of junk out of your hard drive with one click.

It’s too bad that this sort of scamming is clogging up the net. Cynics would say it’s human nature. I think it’s more like the tragedy of the commons with a few individuals abusing the shared resource of the web. The thing to remember with common resources is that it’s ours. Do your part to protect it.