Botnet pointer

Fred Baker fred at cisco.com
Mon Dec 20 21:52:01 UTC 2004


At 02:01 PM 12/20/04 -0800, william(at)elan.net wrote:
>Can somebody also share good definition of "BOT" and "BOTNET" for glossary 
>and description of 2-4 lines? Should I also list it as synonymous with 
>Zombie (bot being more hacker-oriented use and zombie being more toward 
>spammer-oriented use)?

It is not really synonymous, but the distinction is subtle. How about:

"bot": derivative of "robot". An application on an infected computer used 
for orchestrated attacks or for distributed generation of spam, often 
distributed in or with viruses or other malware. Similar to "zombie", which 
is an older usage specific to distributed denial of service attacks.

"botnet": a set of bots that may be controlled as a single service, and 
which may be leased or sold to a user as a unit. 



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