What is a Zombies?

Zombie is a generic term used to refer to a computer system that is attached to the Internet and has been compromised by a Malware such as a Trojan horse, a computer virus or an individual hacker. In majority of the cases, the compromised machine is found to be one of the many in a ‘botnet’, and is used to perform malicious tasks of one sort or another under the remote direction. A majority of zombie computer owners are not even aware that their systems are being put to such a malicious use.

Since the computer system in such a scenario tends to be unconscious, it is metaphorically compared to a zombie. Zombies have been used extensively to send e-mail Spam. In the year 2005, zombie computers sent an estimated 50–80% of the global Spam. The use of Zombies allows the spammers twin advantages of avoiding detection as well as reducing their bandwidth costs, since the owners of zombies pay for the bandwidth consumed by such systems.

Due to the advantages offered by the use of zombies, they are frequently employed to commit click fraud against the web sites that display pay per click advertisements. Other frequent uses include hosting phishing websites or money mule recruiting websites.

Zombies have also been used to conduct distributed denial of service attacks. In the year 2000, several prominent Web sites such as Yahoo and eBay etc were clogged to a standstill by a distributed denial of service attack undertaken by zombies.

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