You also carry the risk of being blocklisted by your ISP, because you’re the only publicly visible email step in the spam sending chain. The crooks pay nothing for their bandwidth. Even if half of the zombified computers are cleaned of malware, the other half keep going. The crooks enjoy many benefits from using other people’s computers to send spam, namely: (Audio player above not working? Download, or listen on Soundcloud.) If you want to send spam but you don’t have a botnet of your own, you can rent time on someone else’s, using the CaaS (crimeware-as-a-service) model.

→ The collective noun for a group of bots is a botnet, short for “robot network.” The cybercrooks that runs a botnet are known as botherders or botmasters. That’s because spammers don’t just use a bot here and a bot there to send unwanted emails, they use a whole collection of bots at the same time (typically tens of thousands or more), for truly distributed spamming power. Attacking other people’s websites, making you look like the crook.īut the criminal activity most associated with bots is spamming.Acting as a proxy, or relay, and charging rent to other crooks so they can use your internet connection to cover their tracks.Downloading more malware, for example ransomware that scrambles your data and demands an unlock fee.Posting “recommendations” for your friends on your social networks.Tricking you into clicking on ads to generate pay-per-click revenue.Searching through your files for interesting data to steal.Logging your keystrokes to steal online usernames and passwords.The idea is simple: malware on your computer regularly “calls home,” often by making an innocent-looking web request using HTTP, just like your browser.īut instead of fetching a web page for display, the bot (short for “malware robot”) downloads a list of instructions, which it carries out using your computer and your network connection. That’s because they’re the money-making machinery of modern cybercrime. We write about bots, also known as zombies, fairly frequently on Naked Security. Attila came up with the idea for, and conducted the research used in, this article. Thanks to Attila Marosi of SophosLabs in Hungary.

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