Symantec ‘arms consumers against PC hijackers’
Norton AntiBot is designed to monitor PC applications and processes around the clock, and to offer an additional layer of protection designed to complement existing security solutions to protect PCs from unauthorised access and tampering.
“Consumers need to know that they may be directly implicated in the criminal activities being perpetrated by botnets – if not by having their own identity or personal information stolen, then by being part of a network of zombie PCs carrying out large scale criminal activities like massive spam distribution and phishing e-mail schemes,” says Premlan Padayachi, Africa consumer country manager, Symantec.
“We are estimating that there are millions upon millions of bot-infected PCs in existence today, with the vast majority of these users having no idea of what is going on behind the scenes of their own computer.”
Symantec Security Response is seeing the number of bot-infected computers continue to rise. In Symantec’s latest Internet Security Threat Report the company found that during the last six months of 2006, there were more than six million active bots, which is approximately 30% more zombie computers than observed in the previous six-month period.
Unlike yesterday’s viruses and worms, today’s bots are stealth and dynamic, secretly installing on systems and turning them into 'zombies’. Once installed, bots can execute new commands sent by a bot master on an ongoing basis. If they are not properly removed, they can re-install themselves, making them particularly difficult to destroy.
Norton AntiBot is designed to completely eradicate all traces of any bot or other malware from a system, once it is identified.
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