Female and Male Hacker Conferences Attendees: Their Autism-Spectrum Quotient (AQ) Scores and Self-Reported Adulthood Experiences

Concerns Over Botnets And Viruses And Their Developers

A “bot,” short form for robot, is a remote-controlled software program acting as an agent for a user (Schell & Martin, 2006). The reason that botnets are anxiety-producing to organizations and governments is that mal-inclined bots can download malicious binary code intended to compromise the host machine by turning it into a “zombie.” A collection of zombies is called a “botnet.’

Since 2002, botnets have become a growing problem. While they have been used for phishing and spam, the present-day threat is that if several botnets form a gang, they could threaten—if not cripple--the networked critical infrastructures of most countries with a series of coordinated Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks (Sockel & Falk, 2009).