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Hardware 2.0

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes

'Kill a Zombie' for Halloween

By | October 31, 2011, 4:56am PDT

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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Adrian Kingsley-Hughes is an internationally published technology author who has devoted over a decade to helping users get the most from technology.

Disclosure

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes

All opinions expressed on Hardware 2.0 are those of Adrian Kingsley-Hughes. Every effort is made to ensure that the information posted is accurate. If you have any comments, queries or corrections, please contact Adrian via the email link here. Any possible conflicts of interest will be posted below. [Updated: February 23, 2010] - Adrian Kingsley-Hughes has no business relationships, affiliations, investments, or other actual/potential conflicts of interest relating to the content posted so far on this blog.

Biography

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes is an internationally published technology author who has devoted over a decade to helping users get the most from technology -- whether that be by learning to program, building a PC from a pile of parts, or helping them get the most from their new MP3 player or digital camera.

Adrian has authored/co-authored technical books on a variety of topics, ranging from programming to building and maintaining PCs. His most recent books include "Build the Ultimate Custom PC", "Beginning Programming" and "The PC Doctor's Fix It Yourself Guide". He has also written training manuals that have been used by a number of Fortune 500 companies.

Adrian also runs a popular blog under the name The PC Doctor, where he covers a range of computer-related topics -- from security to repairing and upgrading.

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RE: 'Kill a Zombie' for Halloween
tom@... 1st Nov
I'm disappointed because of the lack of detail about a bot-signature, vsible load on routers, modems, etc.. The artcle assumes all such evils have been seen before and can be caught by malware checkers, which isn't true. OTOH though, at least it gives some information, even if they are just to run malware checkers. For now, that might get a few of them. But for tomorrow, who knows?
Mother nature did a number on the Northeast.
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."
0 Votes
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@Dr_Zinj ... Having a land-line with or without DSL (POTS) works around all of those. All therough the infamous Ice Storm of '98 we were without power for 8 days, had intermittant power for 5 days, and all thru it, out telephone land line worked perfectly. Very, very few people lost telephone service in northeastern US as long as it wasn't coming from a tower, PBX extenson, or other grid-related power source. Central Offices have "batteries" to whch they switch over to when there is a power failure. How long they can run on battery power depends on a lot of things, but we had phone service throughout the process of no grid power.

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.
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I'm disappointed. I thought you were going rogue and advocating hacktvism against international crime rings. Oh the intrigue! The adventure. Instead, this was just a thinly veiled advertisement for Sophos anti-virus software.
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RE: 'Kill a Zombie' for Halloween
marksteele 31st Oct
@jdyl

made me lol
0 Votes
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RE: 'Kill a Zombie' for Halloween
Ryan Hoover 31st Oct
@jdyl +1
0 Votes
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RE: 'Kill a Zombie' for Halloween
flakeman2@... 31st Oct
Clever
0 Votes
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RE: 'Kill a Zombie' for Halloween
fatman65536 31st Oct
If you really want to kill all of the zombies , then shutdown and completely unplug every Windoze computer in the world.
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RE: 'Kill a Zombie' for Halloween
rocket ride 31st Oct
@fatman65536

And watch commerce in the real world collapse.
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RE: 'Kill a Zombie' for Halloween
kevinreifel 31st Oct
Someone needs to write an gaming UI for Sophos, that does this. A whole industry of zombie hunting in out there waiting.
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RE: 'Kill a Zombie' for Halloween
Scarface Claw 31st Oct
Lame
0 Votes
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Does Sophos run in Linux? Because Clamtk says all the computers in my house are virus free. I got rid of the Zombie 5 years ago (Windows) and haven't regretted it since! Though Ubuntu 11.10 is pushing it a bit!
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I know my PC is zombie-free
epcraig 1st Nov
Nobody writes malware for any Linux distribution.
0 Votes
+ -
I'm disappointed because of the lack of detail about a bot-signature, vsible load on routers, modems, etc.. The artcle assumes all such evils have been seen before and can be caught by malware checkers, which isn't true. OTOH though, at least it gives some information, even if they are just to run malware checkers. For now, that might get a few of them. But for tomorrow, who knows?

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