Computer Bots

One of the other boards I hang out at h had some attempted hijacks. The board has crashed a couple times. The owner/ITguy who owns the system has installed a firewall and although there are still glitches it is working. One of the members suggested that our personal computers could be being used to flood the board without our knowing it even when we are not visiting the board. Can this happen? Doesn't seem right, but thought this was the place to ask. All my antivirus etc is up to date and found nothing.

The short answer is YES! Here's some articles that discuss this:

http://www.kwgn.com/news/kdvr-cyber-crime-031610,0,5969265.story

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A7913-2004Nov23.html

http://www.kaspersky.com/reading_room?chapter=207716786 - see the paragraph on hacker attacks. Also a lot of other good information at this website.

Beware of links you click on in Facebook. They can lead to sites and webpages that have been hacked, just like the ones discussed in the above articles. One of your "friends" can inadvertantly provide you with such a link, thinking it was a "cool" place to investigate, or whatever.

One thing you can do if you think your system has been compromised but your anti-virus/anti-malware finds nothing is to see what processes are running on your system. A good tool for this is Process Monitor. You can get it here:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896645

The best way to become familiar with Process Monitor's features is to read through the help file and then visit each of its menu items and options. The main screen is overwhelming - the screen I find most useful is to bring up the Process Tree window by selecting Tools > Process Tree on the menu bar. It will become obvious to you why I like this screen - it gives discriptions of all known processes running, and it makes it easy to look for something running that shouldn't be there. When you exit this screen, the main screen is still up. If you exit the main screen, everything goes away, but occasionally you'll find Process Monitor still running in Task Manager. I'm not sure why it doesn't always close when you exit it, but I just kill it in Task Manager if it's still there I'm done with it.

You might also want to check out Sticky #6 in the tutorials and make sure you are using the latest scanners that I recommend when you scan for viruses and malware.

Ok the other board isn't Facebook it is a forum site. I will post there letting them know what you have said. Too scary. Thanks Repa!