How Zombie Computers Work

When a hacker makes a zombie computer, he infiltrates an unsuspecting victim's computer and uses it to conduct illegal activities. The user may be unaware that his computer has been taken over. Check out our HowStuffWorks article to learn more.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
It's ready, Are you get in touch with technology? With
tech stuff from how stuff Works dot com. Hey everyone,
and welcome to the podcast. My name is Jonathan Strickland.
I'm the staff writer here at how Stuff Works. And
with me is editor extraordinaire Chris Palette. And today we

(00:23):
thought we'd talked to you a little bit about a
scary thing on the web, the zombie computer. Yeah, so
if your screen starts displaying that over and over again,
you know you've got a problem. Well, first of all,
we should probably tell you zombie computers is kind of
a it's it's a term that the media sort of
invented to describe something that the tech world usually refers

(00:46):
to as a bot uh, And a collection of these
is called a button net. Now, in the media terms,
it's an army of zombie computers, which you can imagine
sounds a little more interesting than a bot net. But
saying yes, yes, it definitely definitely gets the the issues
off the news stand. But so what is a button

(01:06):
net or or a zombie computer? Uh, it's technically it's
it's it could be any computer at all. But it's
a computer that a hacker has gained access to remotely
and can control remotely. Now ideally for the hacker, uh,
he or she can do this without the computer's owner
being aware of what's going on at all. So your

(01:28):
computer could be a zombie computer, it could be a
butt and you might not even be aware of it. Yeah.
Actually that's ideal for the hacker because, uh, if you
have a machine that they are taking advantage of, if
you can detect the fact that it's being used as
a zombie computer, then you're going to do something to
get rid of that. So they wanted as undetectable and
as quiet as possible so that they can continue to

(01:51):
use your your machine now. Um. One of the more
recent and uh in my opinion, scarier UH tactics that
are actually that's a trojan horse program called the storm
worm UM and it's sort of made headlines, but it
sort of hasn't um because they're they're they're so under

(02:13):
the radar, uh with all their their work that they
really haven't Whoever is behind the stormworm has escaped a
lot of public notice. It's not like a lot of
the famous viruses of the past, right, and and just
so you know, that's really the way hackers usually get
get access to your computer. It's it's by tricking you

(02:34):
into downloading and executing a file that is a form
of computer virus UH, usually a trojan horse program UM.
So you download the program, you execute it, and it
executes some some code on your computer that allows the
hacker to get back door access to your your operating system.

(02:54):
The real problem with this, of course, is that if
they do it, well, you don't know, and if you're
not really if you're not really aware this sort of thing,
you might just think you've got a bad file. You know,
you tried to execute something someone said, oh, there's a
great slideshow of pictures on here, and you click on it,
nothing happens. You might just think, oh, you know, the
code gout got a compromise in some way, Well forget

(03:15):
it. It It probably wasn't worth looking at, and you go
on your married little way. Meanwhile, your computer is doing
all sorts of nasty things, and this can include everything
from sending out spam mail to two dozens of people
to UH to something that is called a distributed denial
of service attack. Now that that's something that goes across
an entire network of zombie computers or a bot net,

(03:38):
and it's it's an interesting tactic. It's it's a sabotage tactic.
It's when a hacker decides to try and take down
a website or a web server of a particular individual, corporation,
or organization UM by overloading it. So you tell your
army of computers that you've hacked into to all say

(04:00):
and messages to this one particular web server, and then
next thing you know, that web server gets overloaded with
requests and crashes. And there have been some really big,
big story uh stories of this, like CNN has been
hit by this, Microsoft has been hit by this. Yahoo.
Just because you are a big presence on the web,

(04:23):
and you might even have great Internet security, it doesn't
mean you're immune to this kind of attack. You know.
The funny thing is that in order to take advantage
of a computer system, a hacker has to exploit a
vulnerability UM And basically what that means is somewhere in
the code that operates your computer there is a hole
and they are taking advantage of it. But really the

(04:45):
biggest vulnerability with all of these zombie computer viruses that
the trojan horses. They require you to install that program,
so you are the biggest vulnerability. So as long as
you educate yourself and don't launch strange files, own open
emails from people you don't know, you have a much
better chance of keeping your computer from joining the ranks

(05:06):
of the zombies. Right. And should you actually get infected,
that's not so good. You may have to actually completely
reform at your entire computer, So announce of prevention guys. Anyway,
that's about all the time we have. If you want
to learn more, check out our article on how zombie
computers work at how stuff works dot com for more

(05:27):
on this and thousands of other topics. Does stop works
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