What is Bots?

The term Bot is derived from the word “Robot”. Robot comes from the Czech word "robot," which means "worker". In computer world Bot is a generic term used to describe an automated process. Bots are being used widely on the Internet for various purposes.

Bot functionality may vary from search engines to game bots and IRC channel bots. Google bot is one such famous search bot, which crawls through the web pages on the net to collect information and build database to enable variety of searches. Computer controlled opponents and enemies in multiple player video games are also a kind of bot, where the computer process tries to emulate the human behavior.

However, the usage of bots is not limited to good purpose only. Bots are widely used to perform malicious activities ranging from information stealing to using as a launching pad for distributed attack. Such software’s gets installed on user’s computer without their knowledge. Some bot infected machines, pass the control of the machine to a remote attacker and act as per the attackers command. Such machines are popularly known as zombie machines.

Email spoofing

Email “spoofing” is when an email message appears to have originated from one source when it actually was sent from another source. Email spoofing is often an attempt to trick the user into making a damaging statement or releasing sensitive information (such as passwords). Spoofed email can range from harmless pranks to social engineering ploys. Examples of the later include:

email claiming to be from a system administrator requesting users to change their passwords to a specified string and threatening to suspend their account if they do not comply.

email claiming to be from a person in authority requesting users to send them a copy of a password file or other sensitive information

Mail uses social engineering to tell the user of a contest that the user may have won or the details of a product that the user might like. The sender is trying to encourage the user to open the letter, read its contents, and interact with them in some way that is financially beneficial to them.

Indications of Computer Infection

Some of the indications are given below:

• Poor system performance
• Abnormal system behavior e.g. system restarts or hangs frequently.
• Unknown services are running
• Crashing of applications
• Change in file extensions or contents
• Hard Disk is busy or its light glows continuously

Since we have discussed the basic terminologies and methodologies, now we can start discussing the defensive actions.