A phrase often heard on the news is a botnet. That’s another scary name, like ransomware. It sounds like there’s lots of robots lurking on the Internet as a great big network of trouble.

That’s true and not so true. It is a scary sounding name but the truth is that a botnet is a collection of computers, all of which were infected by the same malware to do the same thing for a controller.

It would be more fun if there were actual robots on the Internet, but since the Internet is a network of information and there’s currently no way for robots to run around on it, instead we have infected computers.  Though imagining R2D2 and BB-8 running around on the Internet is awfully fun.

BB-8 and R2D2 are not part of a botnet

The main controller for these computers use botnets to do their bidding.  They send spam, attack with a DDOS, or any other way they can make money.

Your computer can be part of a botnet and you won’t even know it. That’s a dangerous thing. You become a part of a botnet when your computer  by you clicking on a link and downloading software that adds you to the botnet. The scary thing is that your computer can also be hit because it’s on the same network as an infected computer. If your sibling’s computer is part of the network, it’s going to try to infect yours and it might happen without you knowing it. A good firewall configuration can help.

There’s several famous botnets, they’re famous (or infamous) for the damage they’ve done or the size of them.  These include Grum, ZeroAccess, Windigo, Cutwail, Conficker and Kraken.  I have one question about these botnets… who names these things? I think if I named one I’d name it ‘TeamAwesome Botnet’.

There’s another famous one known as the Mirai botnet.  The reason it was so scary is that it wasn’t computers that were part of the botnet, it was the devices in your home that are on the Internet that were part of the botnet. Things like routers, heating controllers, refrigerators, and even lightbulbs. It was the first major attack that used these devices and it took down a lot of important websites.

So, in summary, there are no robots running amok on the Internet, but there are a lot of computers acting bad.