North American Network Operators Group
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Re: Botnet pointer

  • From: Fred Baker
  • Date: Mon Dec 20 17:07:50 2004 
At 02:01 PM 12/20/04 -0800, william(at)elan.net wrote:
Can somebody also share good definition of "BOT" and "BOTNET" for glossary and description of 2-4 lines? Should I also list it as synonymous with Zombie (bot being more hacker-oriented use and zombie being more toward spammer-oriented use)?
It is not really synonymous, but the distinction is subtle. How about:

"bot": derivative of "robot". An application on an infected computer used for orchestrated attacks or for distributed generation of spam, often distributed in or with viruses or other malware. Similar to "zombie", which is an older usage specific to distributed denial of service attacks.

"botnet": a set of bots that may be controlled as a single service, and which may be leased or sold to a user as a unit.