Alana Maurushat
* Lecturer, Deputy Director of the Cyberspace Law and Policy Centre, and PhD Candidate – all within the Faculty of Law, the University of New South Wales. The subject of the author’s PhD is botnet policy.
Zombie botnets are the greatest Internet threat of the current generation. Botnets are said to be involved in most forms of cybercrime and civil wrongdoing ranging from sending spam, to denial of service attacks, to child pornography distribution to keylogging technology and traffic-sniffing which captures passwords and credit card numbers. This article traces the rhetoric of the term zombie in the world of computer security, describes the inner workings of a botnet, and argues that one method of botnet curtailment will be through Internet Service Provider bot remediation programs that slow down the propagation methods of botnets and act as a catalyst to clean up infected computers.
