can somebody explain something to me?

[gerbick]

what the hell is a "zombie" and how do they spam the living hell out of you?

I mean, is it just simply a computer that's been hijacked, via malware, spyware, trojan, or other, and it sends out e-mails about blah, blah?

if so... then, how does it receive new spam instructions, why is it so hard to track down, and why the hell isn't it illegal yet!?

[GMF ™]

Ladies and gentlemen, the Zombie-In-Chief!


Ask him

[Ihoss]

Yeah gerbs, at least thats what I thought until I saw GMF's picture

A zombie is a computer taken over by a virus/worm/trojan/spyware whatever and a part of it only sends out emails. One part of the computer works to send out the emails while the other part is running normaly, but slow.

Go to nortons homepage and have a look there, they got lots of info on this kind of stuff

[gerbick]

actually, I'm looking at the legality of it all. I mean, these things are sending out spam for companies, right? thus, doesn't that break some law?

been chatting with a friend about this seemingly all night, and still that's a true grey issue.

btw, no more zombie pictures. some of you have posted your real pictures/faces, and I already suffer nightmares as it is.

[vampstko]

Originally posted by gerbick
actually, I'm looking at the legality of it all. I mean, these things are sending out spam for companies, right? thus, doesn't that break some law?

what r u trying to do put me out of work

[PAlexC]

Originally posted by gerbick
actually, I'm looking at the legality of it all. I mean, these things are sending out spam for companies, right? thus, doesn't that break some law?

been chatting with a friend about this seemingly all night, and still that's a true grey issue.

btw, no more zombie pictures. some of you have posted your real pictures/faces, and I already suffer nightmares as it is.

If you think about it, you're talking about distributed computing. Is there a law saying you have to give consent to have your cpu and bandwith used by someone else? There's no access to 'your files', just the OS.

Not for nothing, but anything that rides on scumware/spyware probably has a clause in the legal agreement no one reads when the click "Yes" on the ActiveX installer that pops up.

[Archimage]

I read on account of a Zombie Attack where the Zombie machine had a bot inserted to them which had logged into an IRC private channel and waited there for their instructions. I'll dig for the link.