A Brief History of Cybercrime and Cyberwarfare - The Technical and Social History of Software Engineering - page 387

The following sections discuss these various security threats. These discussions
are representative but not complete. Other forms of cyberthreats exist today, and
new forms of cyberthreats seem to occur almost every month.
Bluetooth Hijacking
Bluetooth hijacking affects not only computers but also smartphones and tablets
that have Bluetooth capabilities. This is a fairly short-range form of attack where
the attacker and victim need to be within about ten feet of each other.
Once an attacker establishes a connection with a victim's device, it is possible
to steal personal information, images and pictures, and perhaps banking informa-
tion and other private data.
Botnets
The term “bot” is derived from the last half of the word “robot.” In the context of
cybercrime, a bot is a computer that has been seized and is under the control of a
malicious software routine that arrived from the web or from an external source
such as a disk or thumb drive. Botnets are illegal in the United States and most
other countries. Government-sponsored botnets are another story.
The problem is bigger than just seizing one computer. The malicious software
is self-propagating and can infect and seize dozens or even hundreds or thousands
of individual computers. When these captive computers operate in concert, this is
called a botnet .
The main use of a botnet is to direct concentrated attacks at websites or the
computers of companies and government agencies with the idea that millions of
incoming messages will swamp their defenses and either shut them down, slow
them down, or prevent their normal work from taking place. This is called a denial
of service attack .
The botnet can be controlled by a bot herder or bot master . The individual en-
slaved computers are sometimes called zombie computers . Although botnets are
often used for denial of service attacks, they have other purposes. For example,
they can be used to send out millions of spam messages or ads or anything else.
Sometimes bot masters rent their bots to other individuals or cybercriminals who
add different kinds of payloads.
Once infected, the individual bot computers may need to be repaired. Some
forms of firewalls and network-based intrusion detection systems (NIDS) can stop
bot attacks. Microsoft Windows is a popular target for botnet attacks. Some an-