FBI fights 'zombies'

The FBI says people have their cars inspected once a year, they should have their PCs inspected regularly too. It’s talking up the problem of “botnets,” or “zombie networks,” the Associated Press reports – networks of infected computers, very often family PCs, that are controlled by the malicious hackers who infected them. “Because the hacker has complete control of each ‘bot’ computer, the botnet can be used to launch denial-of-service attacks, send spam email, steal account login information or run any program.” The federal agency is publicizing some high-profile arrests it has made of botnet jocks, including one of the “world’s top spammers,” based in Seattle, who kept distributing spam even after Microsoft won a $7 million lawsuit against him in 2005, and a guy in Texas who infected “more than 10,000 computers globally, including two Chicago-area hospitals” (delaying medical sevices). People, keep those PCs patched and protected with firewalls and anti-virus software!