A zombie is a computer virus that breaches a system through the Internet. When it gains access to a computer system it can control it and make it do things which are referred to as a zombie virus. Zombie viruses accomplish access to a computer system through the Internet and takes control of it. A zombie virus uses the infected computer to launch Trojan horses, or malicious data to other computers; While the virus and the original perpetrator remains hidden. The infected computer is known as a zombie computer and the perpetrator uses the infected computer to carry out illegal activities. In every scenario possible, the computer user is completely unaware that the computer system has been taken over by a virus. After becoming infected by virus or Trojan horse, the compromised computer slows down, but not enough for the user to notice. Compromised computers are symbolically compared to fictional zombies because their owners are unaware that they are infected.
In the turn of this century we started using the term ‘zombie’ for compromised computers and computer viruses, as it first appeared in the English language in 1871 from West Africa, as snake god and later acquired the meaning of ‘reanimated corpse’ thus a coordinated DDoS attack by multiple botnet machines also resembles a ‘zombie horde attack,’ as depicted in fictional zombie films.
Zombie computer owners do not usually know that their devices are infected; because the owner tends to be unaware. When an infected computer starts sending out hundreds of thousands or even millions of spam messages, or begins attacking specific web pages and its owner may suddenly find that the Internet Service Provider has cancelled the service and eventually you will be investigated as a suspected criminal by cyber security investigators.
People hack into a protected computer system either to gather information, shut down, or simply for the thrill of it deliberately is called a hacker. By breaking password codes, a hacker achieves unauthorized access to computers, to use data. Somebody who experiments with software emerged in the 1960s and the term acquired the meaning hacker in 1975.
Hacking is a white collar crime as it is a crime by people who work behind a desk or with computers. White collar used to refer to office workers of low rank only. However, today the term includes any person who works in an office and does non-manual work. Hackers often use a network of compromised computers which are collectively called zombie computers to launch DOS attacks and spread email spam. And these networks of interconnected computers are called as ‘botnets.’
DOS stands for denial-of-service, i.e., a cyber-attack which overloads a computer or network resource, making it unavailable. DOS attacks, for example, make websites crash by flooding them with visitors. Along with e-mail spams and denial-of-service attacks, hacking is a type of cyber-attack. An e-mail spam involves sending thousands of e-mails to one account holder so that it overwhelms the system and crash the e-mail server.
Zombie viruses are often used to conduct DDOS (distributed denial-of-service) attacks that involve flooding of targeted websites which in turn gets a massive number of simultaneous visitors by other infected computers so that the whole computer system crashes. A denial-of-service or DoS occurs when a computer or computer network becomes unavailable because something has disrupted the service. In this case, the e-mail spam has caused the denial-of-service or DoS. A distributed degradation-of-service attack is a variant of a DDOS attack and this type of attack slows down the website, but does not make its systems crash and the targeted website may be affected for months or even years without anybody being aware of the situation.
Another type of attack called ‘e-mail subscription spamming’ where The attacker automatically subscribes the victim, to many electronic mailing lists and Each mailing list sends many messages regularly and there will be a flood of mail hitting the victim’s e-mail account virtually all the time. And a third type of attack is text spamming which is like an e-mail spam, but the attacker uses text messages over SMS and floods the victim with SMS text messages which leads to extremely high phone bills.
Today we live in a ‘cyber age,’ an age of computers, virtual reality, or information technology when cyber is short for ‘cybernetics,’ originated in the 1980s which refers to the science of communications and automatic control in devices or machines. Cyber-attack is a kind of offensive trick to plot target computers or computer networks and also affect personal devices, medical devices, and infrastructures, Laptops, mobile phones, and tablets and the person who initiates the attack is called a hacker. As the criminal uses a computer and a network to carry out the crime to target a computer and thus it is called cybercrime.Cyber security refers to the practice of protecting computer systems, networks, programs, and data from cyber-attacks or digital attacks.
A zombie computer work by connecting a computer or personal computer (PC) to the Internet and taken over by a computer worm, virus, or other “malware.” Groups of such machines, called botnets form a network and often carry out criminal actions without the victims detecting any unusual activity in their computers.
A bot is a piece of software that runs scripts, i.e., automated tasks online and they are referred as a web robot, robot, or Internet bot which perform both structurally repetitive and simple tasks at a significantly faster rate than any human could.A zombie network also known as a botnet is a network or collection of compromised computers or hosts that are connected to the Internet that is wirelessly controlled through standards based networking protocols like HTTP and Internet Relay Chat (IRC).A zombie network operator uses a bot to infect thousands of computers with worms or viruses that logs on to an online server.
IRC (Internet Relay Chat) is a protocol for real-time text messaging between internet-connected computers created in 1988 for group discussion in chat rooms called “channels” although it supports private messages between two users, data transfer, and various server-side and client-side commands. A zombie process is a process in its terminated state also known as a defunct process; in which a program that has parent-child functions. After an execution is finished by child functions, it sends an exit status to its parent function and the child function remains in a “zombie” state, until the parent function receives and acknowledges the message sent by child functions, meaning it has executed but not exited. A zombie VM is a virtual machine that is created, often for a particular purpose, and is forgotten when it is no longer needed for that purpose. As a result, continues to operate, sucking up resources and providing no value. A zombie cookie is an HTTP cookie that returns to life automatically after being deleted by the user and are recreated using a technology called Quantcast, which creates Flash cookies to trace users on the internet and then used to recreate browser cookies, becoming zombie cookies that never die. The main purpose of zombie cookies is to store the personal information of web users for online marketing activities to measure website traffic and gather personal profiles of website visitors. Modern browsers include control settings that allow users to decide whether they want to accept cookies or to opt out and Browsers like Firefox provide an option to delete Flash cookies as well as zombie cookies through the add-on settings. Zombie codes are no longer useful and they are not executed but for reasons that are often obscure, they are still clearly visible, rendering the program’s source code which is not as dangerous and is unfortunately fairly common.
Creeper: The World’s First Computer Virus
Computer viruses preceded computer networks as German mathematician and father of game theory John von Neumann first theorized the concept in the late 1940s that a computer virus as an automatically self-replicating entity and 30 years later someone created one. ARPANET was designed to send communications from computer to computer over long distances, without the need for a dedicated phone connection between each computer in 1969.
One day in 1971, connected teletype computer screens displayed the phrase: “I’m the creeper, catch me if you can!” 1971 ஆம் ஆண்டில் ஒரு நாள், இணைக்கப்பட்ட டெலிடைப் கணினித் திரைகள் இந்த சொற்றொடரைக் காட்டியது: “I’m the creeper, catch me if you can!”
One of Bold, Beranek, and Newman* (now Raytheon BBN Technologies) researchers, Bob Thomas, had created Creeper as an experimental computer program. Creeper was a worm that is a type of computer virus that replicates itself and spreads to other systems. In this case, its targets were Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) computers which were linked to ARPANET. Creeper didn’t encrypt files, demand a ransom, destroy data, steal Social Security numbers, or render centrifuges inoperable. It only displayed its mocking message. Out of scientific curiosity, its creator had simply wanted to create an experimental, self-duplicating program to illustrate that it was possible. Creeper was the first computer virus, but Following Creeper, which was isolated within the realm of researchers, Elk Cloner was the first personal computer virus to be detected and it was written in 1982 by a 15-year-old high school student named Richard Skrenta.
Elk Cloner was a boot sector virus that infected Apple II computers that spread by state-of-the-art, removable storage technology, the floppy disk to become the first major computer virus outbreak.
Elk Cloner was not deliberately harmful, but it did damage some disks and otherwise cause annoyance by displaying the following poem on infected computers
ELK CLONER:
THE PROGRAM WITH A PERSONALITY
IT WILL GET ON ALL YOUR DISKS
IT WILL INFILTRATE YOUR CHIPS
YES, IT’S CLONER!
IT WILL STICK TO YOU LIKE GLUE
IT WILL MODIFY RAM TOO
SEND IN THE CLONER!