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Archive for March 18th, 2009

BBC Jumps Into Botnet Experiment

Posted by paul on March 18th, 2009

BBC Jumps Into Botnet Experiment

BBC Jumps Into Botnet Experiment

The British Broadcasting Company (BBC) recently detailed its own botnet exploits on a program called Click. Click doesn’t air in the US, but the producers of the show rented a 22,000-unit botnet to demonstrate the effectiveness of these botnets against other computers.

What Can You Do With A Botnet?

The producers used the botnet at a very scaled-back capacity to send out spam emails. The results? Even at the botnet’s slowest possible rate, it still managed to send out 10,000 spam messages in the space of a few hours. With the botnet throttled up to full speed, this number could easily have been in the hundreds of thousands, or more.

After the great spam experiment, the producers pointed the botnet at a Web site for the purpose of mounting a denial-of-service attack. The target Web site had previously agreed to be the “victim” in this case. The purpose of the test was to see how many zombie computers it would take to upend the Web site. The result here? Just 60 zombies and three attempts shut down the test site.

What is the lesson here for your slow computer? Not so much that zombies are attacking your computer. Chances are they’re not. Denial of service attacks are largely reserved for juicier targets like servers. The lesson for you and your slow computer is that your computer may be slow because it is one of the 60 computers attacking someone else’s Web site. Or spending out hundreds (or thousands) of spam emails each hour.

Other Things Can Cause A Slow Computer

Before you jump to conclusions, there are many other reasons your computer may be slow. Simple neglect is chief among them. If you write a delete a large number of files on your computer, your disk is very likely to be fragmented. This means your hard disk doesn’t contain enough contiguous free space to write a file, so the computer has to write a bit of the file here, and a bit of the file over there, and another bit of the file way over there. This fragmentation slows down the computer’s ability to retrieve the file and write changes to it.

“Standard installation” is another culprit in slowing down your computer. When you add software to your computer, the “standard installation” may write a lot of information to the computer that you don’t need. This extra information means that the program ends up needing more memory and more hard disk space to run. Standard installations often include fonts, foreign language support and other features you may not need. The next time you load software, do a custom install and see what you’re loading. You may be surprised by what you can safely eliminate!

To keep your computer running cleanly, you’ll want anti-virus and anti-spyware software running. You’ll also want to run a registry cleaner to remove bits and pieces of programs you no longer need, broken or obsolete DLLs, and other leftovers that can clog up your registry and impair the computer’s performance. RegCure is a recognized leading registry cleaner that simply works. It’s been downloaded more than a million times, and works miracles on slow computers.

Photo Credit: Christopher Boyd

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