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https://theconversation.com/how-to-spot-a-cyberbot-five-tips-to-keep-your-device-safe-194269>
"You may know nothing about it, but your phone – or your laptop or tablet –
could be taken over by someone else who has found their way in through a back
door. They could have infected your device with malware to make it a “bot” or a
“zombie” and be using it – perhaps with hundreds of other unwitting victims’
phones – to launch a cyberattack.
Bot is short for robot. But cyberbots don’t look like the robots of science
fiction such as R2-D2. They are software applications that perform repetitive
tasks they have been programmed to do. They only become malicious when a human
operator (a “botmaster”) uses it to infect other devices.
Botmasters use thousands of zombies to form a network (“botnets”), unknown to
their owners. The botnet lies dormant until the number of infected computers
reaches a critical mass. This is when the botmaster initiates an attack. An
attack could involve hundreds of thousands of bots, which target a single or
very small number of victims.
This type of attack is called a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack.
Its aim is to overwhelm the resources of a website or service with network data
traffic.
Attacks are measured by how many connection requests (for example
website/browser connections) and by how much data they can generate per second.
Usually a lone bot can only generate a few Mbps of traffic. The power of a
botnet is in its numbers."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
