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June 24, 2005
NYTimes on Zombies (or "Mules")
This New York Times article on zombie, or mule, computers is sadly demonstrative of the sort of overhyped, and yet not quite serious enough, journalism I usually see about computer security. It relates everything to the base nature of the greedy and the ignorance of the unaware "participants" in the activity, while making it sound like once a computer is compromised, it's somehow achieved sentience and can act on its own to send spam or take down a Web site.
Bruce Gingery has derided the use of the term "zombie", which implies a mindlessness and even (if you understand anything about the history of Haitian zombies) a victimization, a harmless staggering clumsy thing with bloodshot eyes and wearing its best suit (if encrusted with the dirt of the grave). Or maybe, at its most evocative, a scary thing that eats brains.
Sadly, the image is horribly wrong-headed. Back in the days before ubiquitous high-speed networking, finding out a computer was infected with a virus was a reason to disinfect it, perhaps a reason to practice safer computing (such as installing a virus scanner) and little more. Most viruses weren't all that destructive, and those that were had that as its primary goal. Nowadays, however, the compromised machines are under the control of someone else, the viruses are being designed to allow a distant user to control them directly, to load new software of various sorts without the owners' knowledge, and are actively being used to commit crimes.
Bruce suggests that the term "mule" (as in someone who carries drugs for a trafficker, say, in condoms in their stomach on an airplane trip) would be a better indicator of the sort of uses to which infected computers are being put - not zombies, but rather slaves and tools in the hands of others. I agree. We need to think of this problem as serious, and using a term most of us associate with George Romero is inappropriate when the image we should have in mind is the Godfather or Gotti.
Posted by schampeo at June 24, 2005 10:31 AM