Thread: What's Your Current OS

MSG
just out of interest
how do you know you've never had a virus
(generic name, read "any malicious infection")

contrary to any films you've seen, viruses don't generally advertise their presence
there's no screen corrupting into a skull with a slow menacing laugh....

By far the biggest problem at the moment, are Botnets
These compromised computers periodically check for instructions from the botnet operators
and then carry the instructions out

Usually, they secretly connect to an IRC channel
and instructions are sent in the form of special keywords to the IRC channel

This can be used to send spam emails, start a distributed denial of service attack, or whatever the operator wants
Suddenly there's thousands of machines, all across the globe, doing the operators bidding, all at the same time
All this usually happens without the owner of the compromised machine even knowing

Even if you have anti-virus & firewall software, you may not be protected
As rootkits can easily conceal what's really going on from the OS (and so any software running on that OS)

Anyway, a few links to news items recently

Botnet operation controlled 1.5m PCs

FBI: Operation Bot Roast finds over 1 million botnet victims