'Kill a Zombie' for Halloween
Summary: Your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to find and eliminate as many zombie computers as possible.
Here's your chance to make a difference ... tool up and kill a zombie for Halloween.
What ... what are you doing? Put down that baseball bat and chainsaw! I'm not talking the living dead kind of zombie here, I'm taking about the silicon kind that are used by cybercriminals to send spam, distribute malware, and commit identity theft. A zombie computer. What's a zombie computer? It's a computer that's is infected with malware to bring it under the control of the cybercriminals as part of a botnet. Billions of spam emails are sent daily, and 99% of these are sent using zombie computers.
Security firm Sophos have designated October 31st, to be "International Kill-A-Zombie Day".
Your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to find and eliminate as many zombie computers as possible. Here's how:
Scan your computer and those of your friends (ask permission first!) with an up-to-date anti-virus program. If you don't already have an anti-virus you can always download a free trial edition from Sophos. There are a lot of free options available out there. If you use a Mac at home, then Sophos also have free anti-virus software for you.- Keep your operating system and programs up-to-date with the latest security patches, and run a firewall.
- Spread the word on Twitter and Facebook.
Good luck! Do your bit ... but don't get bitten!
Happy Halloween everybody!
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Talkback
If any of my systems are zombies at home, not a problem.
No power from the grid. (Running on generator at home.)
No phone.
No cable.
Ergo, no zombies.
All have been down for 37 hours so far.
By the way, everyone who has a business that can afford to have no phone, no cable, and no outside power for that long and still be in business; speak up now.
Those who remain silent had better never move to "The Cloud."
RE: 'Kill a Zombie' for Halloween
So cell phones, residential phone systems, the clouids, anyplace with PBX that didn't have the requisite power backup of its own OR didn't put spare phones on each of their incoming trunks TO the PBX, were wthout phone service. 911 and E-911 of course was out of the question during the outage, but POST numbers still worked just fine - they just had none of the locale-related location services working.
But checking on Gram or Aunt S was still possible as long as they had POTS too, and so did 911 so you could still call for a snowmoble or bg-track machine to get to those addresses, check them, and report back on whether the situation was bad or good.
I only wrote this because of your blanket statements about the extreme severity of no grid and your "never"/"always" forecasts. No one died here though lots had no heat, went to emergency shelters, returned to burst pipes and things, but no deaths. A lot of njuries, but even those were mostly among the emergency crews from PA, Ohio, Main, Vt and CT, and caused by falling trees or branches.
Ths latest storm seems to have bypassed us, but we're still ready for one should it happen.
RE: 'Kill a Zombie' for Halloween
RE: 'Kill a Zombie' for Halloween
made me lol
RE: 'Kill a Zombie' for Halloween
RE: 'Kill a Zombie' for Halloween
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RE: 'Kill a Zombie' for Halloween
And watch commerce in the real world collapse.
RE: 'Kill a Zombie' for Halloween
RE: 'Kill a Zombie' for Halloween
RE: 'Kill a Zombie' for Halloween
I know my PC is zombie-free
RE: 'Kill a Zombie' for Halloween