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How Do I Determine If My PC is a Zombie?
Captain Chad wonders: "With the recent news of a 1.5-million node botnet, as well as the AIM rootkit worm, I'm getting a bit concerned about whether my PC may be a zombie. I'm seeing a lot of internet activity, even when nothing is running, and I've checked the process explorer for obvious tasks to no avail. I apply patches as soon as they're released, and my antivirus/spyware programs report nothing. How do I determine if my PC is a zombie, and if it is, how would I de-infect it?"
On this same vein, college campuses are often prime breeding grounds for undead-boxen. bcrowell adds: "I'm a teacher at a community college where Windows is the only supported OS -- if you ask the school to put machine on your desk, you get a Windows box. Faculty who want to run MacOS or Linux have had to provide their own machines, and those who want to do PowerPoint presentations for their classes have been told that they have to buy their own laptops and bring them in.
Now Academic Computing has announced a new policy: any unauthorized use of the network, such as plugging in your own computer to a port, is prohibited, and will result in disciplinary action. There are supposedly plans to enforce this rule automatically with hardware and software. Great consternation has ensued in the faculty senate, and the manager who wrote the policy has explained that it is basically aimed at the problem of improperly maintained teachers' machines getting '0wned'. A little ironic, because the Windows boxes maintained by the computing folks keep getting infected by worms. Still, it's not an unreasonable concern; many teachers are clueless. In fact, I wouldn't pretend to know enough to keep a Windows machine secure on a public network, although I haven't had any problem with the FreeBSD box on my desk. Any suggestions on how to deal with this? Effective arguments to use? Good educational resources to point people to so they can learn how to keep their Windows boxes secure? Many of my colleagues seem to think that security mainly involves buying antivirus software."
Now Academic Computing has announced a new policy: any unauthorized use of the network, such as plugging in your own computer to a port, is prohibited, and will result in disciplinary action. There are supposedly plans to enforce this rule automatically with hardware and software. Great consternation has ensued in the faculty senate, and the manager who wrote the policy has explained that it is basically aimed at the problem of improperly maintained teachers' machines getting '0wned'. A little ironic, because the Windows boxes maintained by the computing folks keep getting infected by worms. Still, it's not an unreasonable concern; many teachers are clueless. In fact, I wouldn't pretend to know enough to keep a Windows machine secure on a public network, although I haven't had any problem with the FreeBSD box on my desk. Any suggestions on how to deal with this? Effective arguments to use? Good educational resources to point people to so they can learn how to keep their Windows boxes secure? Many of my colleagues seem to think that security mainly involves buying antivirus software."
Place a bowl full of brains in front of it and see if you get a response.
Happy Halloween >:D
Destroy it. It's the only way to be sure.
you are on the safe side unless the spam you get comes from your own IP.
And Slashdot will tell you.
Yours Sincerely, Michael.
I saw various things on the recently downloaded files list when I got home. I asked him about it, he said he tried to download some things, but that he never ran them because he couldnt find out where they downloaded to.
Now I have paranoia.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
Type "emerge rkhunter". If that works, chances are, you're ok.
Higher brain functions are the first to go with zombies...
It's tough but you have to remember to shoot for the head.
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
...scanned your computer for rootkits, viruses, and trojans, and found it's a hive of filth! It's infested with some really devious stuff. You've got backdoors and unsecured shares everywhere. Spyware is beaming the contents of your hard drive to marketers across SE Asia, and you're delivering at least 300K+ vi@gr4 spams per hour.
Even as I type this it's trying to beam all your personal information back to Ukranian hackers, three different sites that claim they're eBay, and it's sending hundreds of megabytes of data through two FTP servers running on your machine + at least half a dozen IRC connections.
I've taken the liberty of trashing most of your registry, so maybe that'll slow down the infections.
And wow, man, according to my scans, you're in to some really kinky porn! If anyone found I had that kind of stuff on my computer my marriage, career, and everything else in my life would be ruined!
I'd give you more details but for some reason my computer is really bogging down. (I guess it's time to upgrade again.) It takes about ten seconds for each word to appear and I have to keep clicking out of these annoying popups. Anyway, you're totally 0wn3d.