Phishing, Zombie & Botnets

PHISHING
Phishing is a technique used to gain personal information for purposes of identity theft, using fraudulent e-mail messages that appear to come from legitimate businesses. These authentic-looking messages are designed to fool recipients into divulging personal data such as account numbers and passwords, credit card numbers and Social Security numbers.

ZOMBIE
Comprised of zombied PC's secretly under the control of attackers, these botnets are used to infect others, churn out spam, host phishing sites, and do other nasty things to the rest of us. Meantime, every keystroke entered on the zombie PC could be logged and sent to the attackers - potentially revealing login credentials, credit card details, and other sensitive information.

BOTNETS
A hacker kicked off the assault by typing a simple command into an internet chat room. That command awakened dormant software “bots” that had been planted in tens of thousands of PCs around the world with the help of computer viruses.
When the bots read the command in an internet chat room they were monitoring, they began firing a blizzard of page requests at the servers hosting the company sites. Result: the servers effectively got tongue-tied trying to service the requests, and had to go offline until the attack ceased.

MY 2cents worth ADVISE
Patch the Exploit...

Security and Privacy Issues

Confidentiality, integrity, authenticity and privacy is perhaps the most important aspect of computer security for everyday Internet users.
Security becoming more complex and it is crucial to the protection of critical computing and communication infrastructure.
Various approach need to be taken to address the problems, ranging from purely technical issues (e.g., intrusion detection, network security, etc) to ethical.

Some general tips that I can recommend as follows:-
* Apply vendor-supplied software patches in a timely manner
* Disable features/services that are not explicitly required
* Install anti-virus software and keep it up to date
* Use caution when opening email attachments and following URLs

Below are some utility software for detection:-

MWAV, is a free scanning tool only scans for viruses, however, it does not have the capability to clean it.

VIEWTCP is a free network monitoring tool to monitor various ports on your PC and the remote network addresses suspicious applications are accessing. Click on the icon to download.

About Free Software

What is this free software talk all about?

Well according to the Free Software Foundation:-
Free software is a matter of freedom: people should be free to use software in all the ways that are socially useful. Software differs from material objects--such as chairs, sandwiches, and gasoline--in that it can be copied and changed much more easily. These possibilities make software as useful as it is; we believe software users should be able to make use of them.

Some 4000 over free software packages available @
http://directory.fsf.org/GNU/
If you require more informations on free software get the Free Software Magazine @ www.freesoftwaremagazine.com