Botnet

A botnet is a collection of software agents, or robots, that run autonomously and automatically. It also refers to a network of computers using distributed computing software. A computer "robot" or "bot" that serves the wishes of some master spam or virus originator. The main motive behind these botnets is financial gain along with recognition. Botnets have become a significant part of the Internet, albeit increasingly hidden. Due to most conventional IRC networks taking measures and blocking access to previously-hosted botnets, controllers must now find their own servers. Sometimes a controller will hide an IRC server installation on an educational or corporate site where high-speed connections can support a large number of other bots.

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Types of Botnet Attacks

Bot net is a like a robot that sends some codes to remote user as requested by him. It first scans the computer or network for different vulnerabilities and it will use different types of attack . And we have seen what

• Denial-of-service attacks where multiple systems autonomously access a single Internet system or service in a way that appears legitimate, but much more frequently than normal use and cause the system to become busy.
• Adware exists to advertise some commercial entity actively and without the user's permission or awareness, for example by replacing banner ads on web pages with those of another content provider.
• Spyware is software which sends information to its creators about a user's activities – typically passwords, credit card numbers and other information that can be sold on the black market. Compromised machines that are located within a corporate network can be worth more to the bot herder, as they can often gain access to confidential information held within that company. There have been several targeted attacks on large corporations with the aim of stealing sensitive information, one such example is the Aurora botnet.
• E-mail spam are e-mail messages disguised as messages from people, but are either advertising, annoying, or malicious in nature.
• Click fraud is the user's computer visiting websites without the user's awareness to create false web traffic for the purpose of personal or commercial gain.
• Access number replacements are where the botnet operator replaces the access numbers of a group of dial-up bots to that of a victim's phone number. Given enough bots partake in this attack, the victim is consistently bombarded with phone calls attempting to connect to the internet. Having very little to defend against this attack, most are forced into changing their phone numbers.
• Fast flux is a DNS technique used by botnets to hide phishing and malware delivery sites behind an ever-changing network of compromised hosts acting as proxies.

Measures to prevent it:

• The most serious preventive measures utilize rate-based intrusion prevention systems implemented with specialized hardware.
• Removing services that provide reference points to botnets can cripple an entire botnet.
• Updating the Operating system that will avoid or fill all the vulnerabilities will also prevent botnets.
• You may go to opt for products like Norton Anti-Bot and other products given by different anti-virus companies will help in removing the botnets.

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SASFIS

It arrives via a spammed message with a .RAR file attachment. Extracting the compressed file reveals what appears to be an .XLS file. This Trojan drops a file detected as BKDR_SASFIS.AC, which allows threads to be injected to the normal svchost.exe process.

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Most Dangerous Keywords or Search Words

One of the ways we get attacked with a virus or our computers are prone to viruses is the search engine. The possible ways could be any keylogger attached to the links that you get when you type in, any malwares attached to it, Botnets attached to the search engines in particular sites, some redirections when you type particular keywords in the space provided for search. Apart from all these they key words we type in the attract some of the Malwares, viruses on internet.  

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