It was a warm Denver afternoon last year when Serry Winkler's relaxing couch-surfing was interrupted by a pounding at her door. Three Boulder, Colorado sheriff's deputies were there with a warrant...for her computer! Somehow, during one of her marathon 12 hour days on the computer doing work as a political campaign manager, she had allowed a bot - or computer robot - to infect her PC. And the botherder, or hacker using the botnetwork, had used her computer as a staging area for purchasing merchandise online with stolen credit cards. Serry admits she had allowed her computer to be entirely vulnerable, since she'd never actually installed security software on the old Windows 98 machine. She had already experienced regular bouts with hijacked home pages and spyware that replaced regular banner ads on websites with porn advertising. But cops at the door with a warrant? Well, she certainly never anticipated that.
The deputies took away Serry's computer hard drive. Back at the station they used forensic software to record the activity and make a copy of all her information to assist in their investigation. Eventually they tracked the hacker back to a location in Russia! So we joked during a recent interview with a television reporter that she had stumbled into her own version of "Russian Roulette" where her unprotected PC was the victim! She received her computer hard drive back after 3 weeks and has since purchased a new and more powerful computer, as well as turned to her local "tech person" for more regular system checks and updates.
You can do a great deal to protect yourself from bots getting into your computer in the first place: install and keep up-to-date your internet security suite, install all available patches for your operating system and browser software and only visit well-known and well-managed websites. A website that isn't running well-maintained software can actually become a host environment for these bots and unsuspecting visitors who aren't protected can get more than they bargain for with each visit.
Not sure what a bot is? Read more about it at the FBI's website.