What is Zombie?

Understanding Zombie

A computer that has been taken over by a hacker rootkit or Trojan Horse program. A zombie is a compromised computer system that has been infected with malware and brought under the control of an attacker without the owners knowledge. These compromised systems form botnets collections of zombie computers that can be remotely controlled for malicious purposes such as distributed denial-of-service attacks spam distribution credential harvesting cryptocurrency mining and other criminal activities. Zombie threats are addressed in standards like NIST SP 800-83 and various security frameworks. Organizations protect against zombie infections through endpoint protection network monitoring intrusion detection and security awareness. For example an internet service provider might defend against zombie systems by implementing network behavior analysis to identify command and control traffic botnet signature detection to discover infected systems automated notifications to customers whose systems show signs of compromise quarantine mechanisms for infected systems and educational resources to help users clean infected devices preventing their participation in malicious botnet activities. Related terms Botnet Bot Command and control C2 server DDoS attack Malware infection Compromised system Bot herder Malicious network Ransomware Network traffic analysis.