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hello everyone my name is vijay kumar Devireddy and i am glad to have you back on my episode 07 today we are going to discuss about Botnets and zombies. What happens to your computer if it becomes the victim of a botnet? Well, let's say that your computer has picked up some kind of malware and that malware, it's purpose is to change your computer into it's victim, into what we call a zombie. That's right, a zombie becomes part of the botnet and a botnet is simply a collection of compromised computers under the control of a master node. So, what does this really look like? Well, if your computer becomes a zombie, it becomes under the control of some attacker and that attacker has what they call the command and control node or C2 node. That command and control node controls not just your computer but hundreds or thousands or hundreds of thousands of other computers that are part of their botnet. What kind of things can these zombies do? Well, they might be used as a pivot point so that when they get a new victim, or if they're attacking a server, they can access it through your computer and it looks like you're doing the attack instead of the master node. They'll jump from their command and control node into one of the zombies and from the zombie over to the victim and they might go out and use those zombies to host files that are illegal, like child pornography so they don't get caught with them and all sorts of things like that. They may use them to spam other people and send out phishing campaigns and other malware or, most commonly, they can use this botnet to conduct a DDoS, a distributed denial-of-service attack. What exactly is a distributed denial-of-service attack? Well, a distributed denial-of-service attack occurs when many machines target a single victim and attack them at the exact same time. So let's assume that I'm the bad guy and I control a botnet of 100,000 machines and I want to go and take down somebody's website, I can make all 100,000 of my victims, my zombies, target that victim's server and make the request simultaneously. That type of load could end up forcing the web server offline, causing it to crash and not be able to serve its real customers. That is denying it the ability to do its normal functions or its service. That makes it a denial of service and a distributed denial-of-service is just that, it's the most common use of botnets and it's been that way for a long time but these days attackers aren't just doing it for fun and games. Instead they want to make money and so they're using zombies to do things that are processor intensive like bitcoin mining or other cryptomining on their behalf. That's right, when you have a botnet with lots and lots of zombies, you have a lot of processing power at your disposal because each of those machines can give you some of its resources and then they can work in a distributive manner. So, I can set them off and let them start mining coins for me  and thankyou..