A new digital age vocabulary word has just been coined: “botnetweb.“
You know what a botnet is: a collection of hijacked PCs under the control of a hacker (botmaster).
Link a bunch of botnets together and you get a botnetweb, a compilation of millions of PCs.
In a PC World article published yesterday, Ed Larkin writes:
Botnetwebs don’t just enable crooks to send spam or malware to millions of PCs at once. They also represent a highly resilient infection that uses multiple files. An attempt at disinfection might eliminate some files, but those left behind will often redownload the scrubbed ones.
Another new challenge to your security software suite, with some new twists. There’s evidence ”of cooperation and coordination among major spam botnets, representing a sea change in the way malware works.“ And botmasters now use multiple malware files, further reducing the chances that your anti-virus package will catch and erase the complete infection. You can’t assume that when your anti-virus reports that an infection has been removed, your PC is clean. Other malware, working as a kind of back-up, likely is still there.
One suggestion is to download and run several anti-malware tools. But that tactic brings its own perils.
The best answer is to have a service manage your security for you, and handle the maintenance, too, just like big corporations do. You’ll have highly trained experts managing your security software and keeping your PC clean and running at its best for a small monthly fee. It’s cheaper than the do-it-yourself method and it works better.
This kind of service isn’t just for companies anymore. It’s a brand new category of service for consumers and small business owners called ”Personal Computer Services.“ It allows you to turn over all the headaches of PC ownership to qualified experts for about $15 a month.
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