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Zombie masters caught

October 31, 2005 By Anne Leave a Comment

I know, I sound so sci-fi. But there’s nothing other-worldly about zombie masters, unfortunately. An awful lot of family PCs like yours and mine are “zombies” (computers that have been infected by Trojan software that gives control of them to the senders of the Trojan carrying worm or virus), unbeknownst to us! The “zombie masters” are the people who control whole networks (called “botnets”) of these hijacked PCs to send spam (to make money) or launch denial-of-service attacks (against retail and other Web sites, sometimes for extortion money). Zombies in people’s homes are by no means unusual. Microsoft, which has been working on this problem, believes “more than half of all spam is sent by zombies” and that there are tens of millions of zombies worldwide,” CNET reports in an article about the company’s progress in tracking zombie masters and shutting them down. Microsoft has identified 13 different spamming operations that use such zombies” so far, according to CNET. The US’s Federal Trade Commission has been encouraging the Internet industry to take more action in this area. For example, it has asked Internet service providers (ISPs) to quarantine zombies and help us customers clean our infected PCs. For its ongoing investigation, “Microsoft intentionally created a zombie computer” – a PC not unlike one in anyone’s household. “Over a three-week period, the PC was accessed 5 million times by its remote controllers and used to send out 18 million spam messages advertising more than 13,000 Web sites” (though Microsoft reportedly blocked the spam before it got sent). For more on this, see the latest from the Washington Post on local tech support and my “What if our computer’s a zombie?!“

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IMPORTANT RESOURCES

Our (DIGITAL) PARENTING BASICS: Safety + Social
NAMLE, the National Association for Media Literacy Education
CASEL.org & the 5 core social-emotional competencies of SEL
Center for Democracy & Technology
Center for Innovative Public Health Research
Childnet International
Committee for Children
Congressional Internet Caucus Academy
ConnectSafely.org
Control Shift: a pivotal book for Internet safety
Crimes Against Children Research Center
Crisis Textline
Cyber Civil Rights Initiative's Revenge Porn Crisis Line
Cyberwise.org
danah boyd's blog and book about networked youth
Disconnected, Carrie James's book on digital ethics
FOSI.org's Good Digital Parenting
The research of Global Kids Online
The Good Project at Harvard's School of Education
If you watch nothing else: "Parenting in a Digital Age" TED Talk by Prof. Sonia Livingstone
The International Bullying Prevention Association
Let Grow Foundation
Making Caring Common
Raising Digital Natives, author Devorah Heitner's site
Renee Hobbs at the Media Education Lab
MediaSmarts.ca
The New Media Literacies
Report of the Aspen Task Force on Learning & the Internet and our guide to Creating Trusted Learning Environments
The Ruler Approach to social-emotional learning (Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence)
Sources of Strength
"Young & Online: Perspectives on life in a digital age" from young people in 26 countries (via UNICEF)
"Youth Safety on a Living Internet": 2010 report of the Online Safety & Technology Working Group (and my post about it)

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