Advanced Steps To Botnets Understanding – Semalt Expert

A botnet stands for robot networking. It can be defined as a computer network that has been infected by a virus known as Malware or is under the control of a bot-herder. Every computer that is being controlled by a bot-herder is referred to as a bot. This attacker is capable of sending commands to the computer's botnet to carry out harmful actions.

Michael Brown, the Semalt Customer Success Manager, explains that the attacker can carry out the criminal actions depending on the units or scale of bots that have attacked the computer network. Bots are capable of performing more dangerous operations that could not be achieved with malware. When botnets enter the computer network, they can remain in the system and be controlled by the remote attacker. This way infected computers can obtain updates which make them change their behaviors very fast.

Some of the actions performed by botnets include:

Email spam

Most individuals tend to ignore this aspect since they feel like email has already become an old subject of attack. However, spam botnets are massive in size and can attack anywhere. They are mainly used to send out spam or false messages which include malware which comes in many numbers from every botnet. For example, the Cutwail botnet is capable of sending 74 billion messages in a day. This allows the bots to spread thus affecting more and more computers each day.

DDoS attack

It powers a massive scale of the botnet helping it to overload an aimed network with loads of requests thus making it inaccessible to its users. A person will need to pay to access the computer, and this mostly occurs to organizations either for personal or political motives thus denying them to get some vital information, and they will end up paying just to stop the attack.

Financial breach

These botnets are designed to steal funds from credit cards and enterprises. This is achieved by stealing confidential credit card information. These include ZeuS botnet which has been used to help in stealing millions of funds from multiple companies.

Targeted intrusions

These botnets are small in size and are tailored to help attackers to intrude in organizations and get confidential information from them. These actions are dangerous to institutions as they target the most secret and valuable data, including research, financial information, clients' personal information and intellectual property.

These attackers are made when the bot-herder directs bots to control servers with the use of emails, file sharing, and other social media application rules or using other bots to act as an intermediate. When the computer user opens the mischievous file, the bots send reports to the command allowing the bot-herder to take over and make orders to the affected computer.

Botnets have become a significant cyber threat as they are sophisticated compared to other computer viruses, and these have profoundly affected the governments, firms, and individual. Botnets can control networks and gain power, and they can lead to massive losses as they act as interior hackers who are capable of performing mischievous actions thus ruining an organization.