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...