We fight zombies every day. Really. No, not the George Romero kind. We deal with electronic zombies.
Thanks to the prevalence of “always on” Internet connections and the lack of security precautions on the part of the owners of a large population of computers using these connections, the Internet is crawling with zombies.
They’ll suck out your brains!
Internet zombies are like movie zombies in a few ways:
- They’re after your brains: Zombies are responsible for a major portion of the mindless in-box pollution known as spam. If they get their teeth into you, you’ll start doing stupid things like buying pharmaceuticals from anonymous internet addresses.
- They don’t respond to reason: In the movies you can pound on zombies with a baseball bat and they hardly notice it. Similarly, if you reply to email from a zombie it only encourages them.
- They’re contagious: Besides sending spam zombies also try to recruit other zombies. Once a machine becomes a zombie, the virus animating it will often look through email contacts and network connections available to its host computer in order to find other computers to infect.
