A friend of mine wrote this in his blog. What are the rolls of OS regarding Bots?
"A bot is a compromised computer controlled by cash-hungry crooks. That's about as simple as I can state it. There are situations where bot 'owners' have nefarious goals in mind, but in most cases the bottom line motivation is cash, plain and simple. A botnet is a bunch of bots..a big bunch. Thousands to millions. Mostly unnoticed by the public, botnets have come to flood the Internet. *Get this statistic! *On a typical day, 40% of the 800 million computers connected to the Internet are bots engaged in spam email <http://appendum.com/#>, stealing sensitive data typed in at banking and shopping websites, flooding websites with requests as part of DOS(denial-of-service) attacks, etc. Does that blow you away? 40%! 320 million bots! OK, how about this one? 91% of all email is spam and most of that is sent by botnets. That percentage is up drastically from 64% just last summer. Botnets were calculated to have carried out over 7 million instances of 'unsavory' activity in January compared to a little over 300,000 in August 2006. That is an astronomical <http://appendum.com/#> increase. Experts feel the worst is not over, in fact, they believe the worst has not yet arrived. At the rate things are going, the Internet may become basically unusable due to bot activity. The compromising danger that is out there now is so bad already that if you put a computer on the Internet with a raw unpatched operating system <http://appendum.com/#>, the machine would be compromised in minutes. In fact, testing has shown that some computers have been hit within seconds. I wrote in an earlier post about people on dial-up thinking their computers needed replacing because they were so slow - not realizing that sites were getting larger and requiring more time to load. Basically, the same thing happens with a compromised computer. Now that the PC is a part of one or more bots, it has work to do to fulfill its mission. The indication to a user of a problem comes through a computer that has become sluggish and nothing seems to help improve it. As with the earlier scenario, there's no telling how many million computers are replaced too early because they have been turned into bots. You may not think this matters much to you if you feel certain your machine is not part of a botnet, but consider the overall picture. How much traffic load is placed on the network by 320 million computers? Who pays for the traffic? Rest assured the ISPs <http://appendum.com/#> will not absorb it. Eventually, it will all filter down to the end user. You will pay. So how great is this deal? Your computer gets botted and your bill goes up to cover the extra network costs. So the botmeister not only gets to use your computer for free (thanks, dude) but you pay his Internet access fee as well (did I say thanks dude?). Let's get an International agreement in place that these perpetrators, when caught, get a minimum of 25 years, no parole. And while we're at it, pay a really nice reward to a snitcher that helps break up a botnet. Financial incentivization sometimes works. In the meantime, be sure your PC is fully protected by being updated with every available service pack and patch. It is even recommended that if you were to install an OS like XP from the first version (no service packs included), that you get a copy of the latest SP on disk and install before ever putting the computer online <http://appendum.com/#>. As an individual user there is little you can do to stop the botnets but you can take every precaution so you don't get zombied and become a zombot. Harry _______________________________________ http://www.okiebenz.com For new parts see official list sponsor: http://www.buymbparts.com/ For used parts email [EMAIL PROTECTED] To Unsubscribe or change delivery options go to: http://okiebenz.com/mailman/listinfo/mercedes_okiebenz.com
