Magnet, Nets, MegaNet or Botnet??? Part 1 of 2

Do you know that your computer would be compromised and be part of a group of computer used to sent out spam mail or carry out attack on others computer without your knowing?

Which of the terms below represent a group of compromised system used for malicious activities??

1) MegaNet
2) Botnet
3) Nets
4) Magnet

Read on if you are clueless about this. I will be explaining Botnet and how to prevent your computer from being part of it.

Basically botnet are a group of compromised system normally infected by Worms or Trojans control by hackers to carry out malicious operation such as Spamming, Distributed Denial of Services attack, etc The common questions on Botnet are such as I have anti virus do I still get infected?, I am behind a firewall, so I should be safe right? And how do I know if I am part of a botnet?

Anti Virus software would normally do a pretty good job in keeping out the viruses, worms, Trojan, etc. But between the time when a new malicious code was found flooding the internet and the virus definition file was release by the vendors, there would be a window period that your system could be compromised. Unlike virus, worms are autonomous. They have their own transport and mechanism and are independence and could self replicate themselves to other system in the network. Often when a PC has been compromised, a install or update of virus definition files would also not detect the worms as it would return a false call to the scan from the anti virus software. This explain why often you heard of people saying why their latest anti virus software are not detecting the virus.

Trojan often come in disguised, remember the “Trojan Horse” event? Trojan often come in the form of a useful software that the user could use and is lured into downloading it from the internet. I am sure many of you have experiences a pop up from your anti virus detecting a Trojan after downloading a program from the Internet. But what happen if it is not detected? The answer is your system is probably a member of an xzy botnet.

Ask yourself, can your firewall detect what you sent from your email? Traditionally, your firewall can’t do so. Firewall act as a gate between your system/network and the Internet. It only work on ports. And this gateway doesn’t work for email ports, else if it does, no mail can be sent out of the network. This also explain the reason why companies need separate anti spam appliance or Unified threat Machine (UTM) for their SMTP port. So can your firewall wall protect you from being a botnet spammer? I guess the answer is obvious.

End Part 1 of 2