Malicious Uses of Botnets

     Why should users be concerned if their computers are infected by rootkits and develop botnets? The answer is the damage that their infected systems can do. There is a myriad of harmful uses for botnets and bot-herders are not limited to a single type. The following list demonstrates those uses:

• Distributed Denial-of-Service Attacks
• spamming
• sniffing Traffic
• key logging
• spreading new malware
• installing Advertisement Add-ons and Browser Helper Objects (BHOs)
• Google AdSense abuse
• attacking IRC Chat Networks
• manipulating online polls/games
• mass identity theft
  (Bacher, et al., 2005)

     Botnets are not limited to any one type of activity and participating bots may contain add-on Trojans as payloads, in fact; controlling botnets has grown into big-business.

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