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Speaker 1: tech stuff from how stuff Works dot com. Hey everyone,
Speaker 1: and welcome to the podcast. My name is Jonathan Strickland.
Speaker 1: I'm the staff writer here at how Stuff Works. And
Speaker 1: with me is editor extraordinaire Chris Palette. And today we
Speaker 1: thought we'd talked to you a little bit about a
Speaker 1: scary thing on the web, the zombie computer. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: if your screen starts displaying that over and over again,
Speaker 1: you know you've got a problem. Well, first of all,
Speaker 1: we should probably tell you zombie computers is kind of
Speaker 1: a it's it's a term that the media sort of
Speaker 1: invented to describe something that the tech world usually refers
Speaker 1: to as a bot uh, And a collection of these
Speaker 1: is called a button net. Now, in the media terms,
Speaker 1: it's an army of zombie computers, which you can imagine
Speaker 1: sounds a little more interesting than a bot net. But
Speaker 1: saying yes, yes, it definitely definitely gets the the issues
Speaker 1: off the news stand. But so what is a button
Speaker 1: net or or a zombie computer? Uh, it's technically it's
Speaker 1: it's it could be any computer at all. But it's
Speaker 1: a computer that a hacker has gained access to remotely
Speaker 1: and can control remotely. Now ideally for the hacker, uh,
Speaker 1: he or she can do this without the computer's owner
Speaker 1: being aware of what's going on at all. So your
Speaker 1: computer could be a zombie computer, it could be a
Speaker 1: butt and you might not even be aware of it. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Actually that's ideal for the hacker because, uh, if you
Speaker 1: have a machine that they are taking advantage of, if
Speaker 1: you can detect the fact that it's being used as
Speaker 1: a zombie computer, then you're going to do something to
Speaker 1: get rid of that. So they wanted as undetectable and
Speaker 1: as quiet as possible so that they can continue to
Speaker 1: use your your machine now. Um. One of the more
Speaker 1: recent and uh in my opinion, scarier UH tactics that
Speaker 1: are actually that's a trojan horse program called the storm
Speaker 1: worm UM and it's sort of made headlines, but it
Speaker 1: sort of hasn't um because they're they're they're so under
Speaker 1: the radar, uh with all their their work that they
Speaker 1: really haven't Whoever is behind the stormworm has escaped a
Speaker 1: lot of public notice. It's not like a lot of
Speaker 1: the famous viruses of the past, right, and and just
Speaker 1: so you know, that's really the way hackers usually get
Speaker 1: get access to your computer. It's it's by tricking you
Speaker 1: into downloading and executing a file that is a form
Speaker 1: of computer virus UH, usually a trojan horse program UM.
Speaker 1: So you download the program, you execute it, and it
Speaker 1: executes some some code on your computer that allows the
Speaker 1: hacker to get back door access to your your operating system.
Speaker 1: The real problem with this, of course, is that if
Speaker 1: they do it, well, you don't know, and if you're
Speaker 1: not really if you're not really aware this sort of thing,
Speaker 1: you might just think you've got a bad file. You know,
Speaker 1: you tried to execute something someone said, oh, there's a
Speaker 1: great slideshow of pictures on here, and you click on it,
Speaker 1: nothing happens. You might just think, oh, you know, the
Speaker 1: code gout got a compromise in some way, Well forget
Speaker 1: it. It It probably wasn't worth looking at, and you go
Speaker 1: on your married little way. Meanwhile, your computer is doing
Speaker 1: all sorts of nasty things, and this can include everything
Speaker 1: from sending out spam mail to two dozens of people
Speaker 1: to UH to something that is called a distributed denial
Speaker 1: of service attack. Now that that's something that goes across
Speaker 1: an entire network of zombie computers or a bot net,
Speaker 1: and it's it's an interesting tactic. It's it's a sabotage tactic.
Speaker 1: It's when a hacker decides to try and take down
Speaker 1: a website or a web server of a particular individual, corporation,
Speaker 1: or organization UM by overloading it. So you tell your
Speaker 1: army of computers that you've hacked into to all say
Speaker 1: and messages to this one particular web server, and then
Speaker 1: next thing you know, that web server gets overloaded with
Speaker 1: requests and crashes. And there have been some really big,
Speaker 1: big story uh stories of this, like CNN has been
Speaker 1: hit by this, Microsoft has been hit by this. Yahoo.
Speaker 1: Just because you are a big presence on the web,
Speaker 1: and you might even have great Internet security, it doesn't
Speaker 1: mean you're immune to this kind of attack. You know.
Speaker 1: The funny thing is that in order to take advantage
Speaker 1: of a computer system, a hacker has to exploit a
Speaker 1: vulnerability UM And basically what that means is somewhere in
Speaker 1: the code that operates your computer there is a hole
Speaker 1: and they are taking advantage of it. But really the
Speaker 1: biggest vulnerability with all of these zombie computer viruses that
Speaker 1: the trojan horses. They require you to install that program,
Speaker 1: so you are the biggest vulnerability. So as long as
Speaker 1: you educate yourself and don't launch strange files, own open
Speaker 1: emails from people you don't know, you have a much
Speaker 1: better chance of keeping your computer from joining the ranks
Speaker 1: of the zombies. Right. And should you actually get infected,
Speaker 1: that's not so good. You may have to actually completely
Speaker 1: reform at your entire computer, So announce of prevention guys. Anyway,
Speaker 1: that's about all the time we have. If you want
Speaker 1: to learn more, check out our article on how zombie
Speaker 1: computers work at how stuff works dot com for more
Speaker 1: on this and thousands of other topics. Does stop works
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