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

So now that you have an idea of what is botnet, are you part of it?

Botnet computer are computer infected with Trojan or malicious code design to allow remote control of the infected computer. Many still have the traditional thinking that botnet are controlled using Internet Relay Chat (IRC) which is a dying trend. But the actual fact is that botnet are very much alive as hackers are using a mixture of protocol and stealth technique to infect and control infected machines. According to researched, as many as 1.5 million botnet have been found and the number are growing.

Botnet computer are not immune from detection. There will be signs and trails of infection and prevention can be practiced. Simple task will be looking out for unusual running of services, process and going through the log files. If you suspect that your computer had been infected, do the following;

1) Update your operating system and internet application to prevent as much vulnerabilities as possible
2) Install a different anti-virus on your operating system and do a full updated scan. Your existing anti-virus are most likely to be compromised and by updating it and doing a full scan won’t help most of the time.
3) Install and run a updated malware/spyware application. There are lots of freeware in the Internet. “Spybot – Search & Destroy” is one of my favourite.
4) Go through the services and spot unusual services.
Once you have done the above and you are pretty sure that you are free from being a botnet, install a personal firewall. Firewall wall normally closed all unnecessary ports and this make your computer a difficult for the hacker.

All these actions won’t guarantee that you won’t be part of a botnet someday. But no prevention is 100% and by making your computer a difficult target, chances of you being part of the botnet network is being narrow down by a great margin!

As the saying goes. “The only way not to make mistake is not to do anything. But in today’s world, that would probably be the biggest mistake” - Sun Tze