Filter
Top Products
Understanding Internet risks
The likelihood of being attacked
132
A zombie program is a dormant program secretly installed on a computer.
It can later be run remotely to aid in a collective attack on another
computer. Zombie programs don’t normally damage the computer on which
they reside, but are used to attack other computers. A zombie program can
arrive as an email attachment.
Norton AntiVirus protects you from receiving and executing viruses,
Trojan horses, worms, and zombies. Norton AntiVirus scans email as you
receive it and also checks files when you open them, providing two levels of
protection.
Norton Personal Firewall ensures that Trojan horses do not communicate
over the Internet. This means that you are protected from hackers who use
Trojan horses.
The likelihood of being attacked
The Internet presents many risks. What are the odds that your computer
will be attacked? The chance of an attacker singling out your computer
from all of those on the Internet is slim. However, the use of port-scanning
and other computer discovery tools by hackers means that your computer
may be scanned relatively frequently for vulnerabilities. The more
vulnerabilities that are found, the more inviting your computer is to
hackers.
The tools that hackers use to find targets can scan large groups of
computers on the Internet. The hacker simply enters a range of IP
addresses to be scanned. The program checks each IP address in the range
to see if a computer is there. If it finds a computer, it performs a series of
tests to identify vulnerabilities, such as having Microsoft networking
enabled over the Internet. The hacker returns to find a list of computers
and their vulnerabilities.
Norton Personal Firewall protects you from these scans by making your
computer invisible. Your computer won’t respond to queries that these
scanners send. This means that your computer exhibits no vulnerabilities
to the hacker, making it a poor target for attack.