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Whenever we think about online criminals and cybercrime lots of people still just imagine a gang of bored kids sitting around in their parent’s homes, writing some nasty programs and stealing some cash, but actually it’s nothing like that. The reality is that cybercrime is controlled by highly advanced, well-organized and extremely creative organizations that execute quite complex hierarchical projects in an effort to generate a significant profit from a range of activities . These crime syndicates are turning cybercrime into a increasingly more developed market on a yearly basis. The botnet industry is widely known as the very best demonstration of exactly how developed cybercrime is becoming. Botnets
Botnets are large amounts of computers which are controlled by “Bot masters” and are used by cyber criminals in several techniques in order to earn them spectacular profits. A botnet is essentially an army of computer systems from diverse locations around the world, that are recruited with out the awareness of their owners for attacking websites, network equipment and other services around the globe. Botnets are comprised of multitudes of computers that have been broken into by the Bot masters.You can find numerous different botnets out there in the world, each of them controls thousands of computer zombies. Certain botnets may even reach numbers of tens of millions of slaves! Every botnet is controlled by a Command and Controls server (C&C) that controls the actions of it’s botnet. Command and Control hosts instruct the botnets to perform various tasks, for instance create HTML requests from websites, generate massive traffic to network equipment and many other things. Botnets are frequently applied to Distributed Denial Of Service (DDoS) attacks around the world. This is accomplished by employing the great number of processing force of the botnet to continuously perform connection requests to web sites and networking gear, consequently over-loading them with work and traffic and effectively denying them the capability to offer service for legit users. As of today the greatest DDoS attacks are reported to strike with a power of approximately 300 Gbps of traffic, this is powerful enough to disable even the largest of websites for a while. The Command and Control programs advanced to a point that it requires hardly any technical skill in order to operate then. . The most thriving C&C programs available are known as Zeus and SpyEye, between them they control the vast majority of the C&C industry. Here is some of the features that Command & Control applications execute over the botnet computers: Key stroke logging, Mail Stealing, HTML password grabbing, DDoS attacks and much more How Computers Get Infected
1. Spam - By sending junk e-mail to Billions of users containing Malware, or hyperlinks to malicious sites.
2. Browser vulnerabilities and drive-by-downloads. How to protect the computer from browser vulnerabilities
3. Torrents - Malware is often concealed in torrents downloaded by the users.
4. Phishing - Phishing happens when a person is deceived into believing that he is in a site he trusts, but instead he is in a web site controlled by the hacker.
5. From time to time cyber criminals find a way to hack into legitimate web sites and change some files on those servers with viruses.
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botnet, malware. virus, how to protect the computer,
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