Hygiene Keeps Computers From Turning Into Zombies

As everyone knows, hygiene is vitally important to good health. Avoiding activities and places that harbour bad things is an important key to staying bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.

Just as in life, the same applies to your computer. If you're one of the more than 95 per cent of the world's computer owners who use Windows, you know how easy it is to pick up a nasty bug. In the past, computer viruses ranged from cute to annoying to downright destructive. Just like their biological counterparts, however, viruses are mutating. Nowadays, you may not even know that your computer is sick. The signs of infection can be very hard to spot. Maybe it's running just a bit slower than normal. Maybe it seems busy when it shouldn't be. Have you ever walked by your computer and noticed the hard drive activity light flashing when you're not using it? Maybe you've noticed the lights on your your modem flashing when you're not online. What the heck is going on? Chances are that it's something benign. It may be a scheduled anti-virus scan, maybe a scheduled Windows update. These days, computers spend a lot of time just doing their own thing.

So what's the problem with a virus, then. If it doesn't destroy data or damage your computer or slow you down, what's the problem? Well, the problem is that that the virus may be turning your computer into a zombie. Doesn't sound so benign now, does it? I just read a column where it was estimated that 170,000 computers are taken over every day! Today's virus writers are no longer a pimply-faced teen, looking to show off his coding prowess. Today's virus writer is a stone-cold hacker; he wants to make money with your computer and he doesn't want you to know he's there.

How does he make money with your computer? There's a few ways. He could be selling access to your computer to spam e-mailers. Spammers need to send millions of e-mails to make money. Even if they could afford the bandwidth required, their ISP (service provider) would soon shut them down.

The hacker could also sell your computer to someone who wants to "attack" other computers. The most famous instance of this happening was when the country of Estonia was shut down by a co-ordinated attack (called a Denial of Service, or DoS Attack) from computers around the world. Yours may have been one of them and you didn't even know it. These attackers assemble networks of thousands of computers called BotNets. Then they go to legitimate websites and use the threat of a DoS attack to extort money. Imagine if you had a gambling site and someone e-mailed you and offered to "protect" you from an attack on Superbowl Sunday. You'd pay.

Finally, and this is the really scary one, the hacker may install a key logger on your system. With this little bit of freely available software, he can see everything you type on your computer. Every web site, every e-mail, every password, every financial transaction!

So how do they get onto your system? There are a number of ways, but it all comes down to your behaviour. Do you download music? Do you open e-mail attachments? Do you visit "shady" websites? Do you click links in e-mails? These are all ways that hackers can gain access to your machine. Sometimes they use something called "social engineering," which is similar to the old-fashioned con man routine. They may phone you up and tell you your system's at risk and you need to give them your passwords so that they can stop the attack. One novel approach is to leave a USB thumb drive laying in a parking lot. You pick it up, thinking it's been lost. You take it home, stick it in your machine to identify the owner and, guess what, the hacker has just taken your machine.