ZOMBIE COMPUTERS.RAYMOND GOZZI, JR. [*] SOMETHING STRANGE started happening to the computers at Yahoo!, an Internet portal and search engine company, on Monday morning, Feb. 7, 2000. The huge complex of computers started slowing down. Instead of loading pages in 1.7 seconds, the computers were taking over 6 seconds to load web pages -- and 6 seconds is a long time in Internet Time In the early days of the public Internet, Internet time referred to the breakneck speed with which companies scrambled to gain traffic and market share on the Web. A new business could come and go within a matter of weeks. . From there things got worse. By 10:30 a.m. Pacific Time, almost half the users who tried to log on to Yahoo! were shut out -- getting error messages DOS and Windows error messages are listed individually in this database by the message that is displayed when they occur. See also DOS error messages and Application Error.  . Engineers discovered that a "huge tidal wave tidal wave, term properly applied to the crest of a tide as it moves around the earth. The wavelike upstream rush of water caused by the incoming tide in some locations is known as a tidal bore. of
data" was overwhelming the computers. Furthermore, this data,
(meaningless requests, diagnostic messages, and bogus requests for
information) was coming from at least 50 different computers. A
denial-of-service (DoS) attack was in progress. (Levy & Stone,
2000.)
The Yahoo! engineers were able to redirect traffic to backup computers, and by mid-afternoon, the service was running normally. The DoS attack See denial of service attack. stopped about then also. But the story was not over. The next day, Tuesday, Feb. 8, similar Denial of Service attacks temporarily slowed or crippled some of the Internet's bigname sites: eBay (an auction site), CNN.com (the news site of the Cable News Network), Buy.com (a store site offering stock publicly for the first time that day), and Amazon.com (the bookseller-turned-variety store). On Wednesday, Feb. 9, the DoS attacks hit four other sites (ZDNet.com, E-Trade, Datek, and Excite). Attorney General Janet Reno Janet Reno (born July 21, 1938) was the first and to date only female Attorney General of the United States (1993–2001). She was nominated by President Bill Clinton on February 11, 1993, and confirmed on March 11. held a news conference and promised that the FBI would catch the culprits. Speculation abounded. Who might have orchestrated these high-profile attacks? What were their motives? One thing was sure -- the stocks of computer security companies went up. Along with the speculation, a new metaphor appeared in the nation's press: zombie computers. The computers which had sent those thousands of meaningless requests for information to Yahoo! and others were described as zombies Zombies Companies that continue to operate even though they are insolvent. Also known as living dead. Notes: It's advisable to avoid investing in zombies at all costs their life expectancies are highly unpredictable. . They had been taken over by programs hidden somewhere in their memories by malicious hackers. At a certain time, a signal was sent, and the hidden programs took over the host computers, directing them to send large volumes of requests to the target sites. (Technically this was called a Distributed Denial of Service attack.) The computers had become zombies, mindlessly obeying the will of the faraway hackers. Sources identified three of the zombie computers as mainframes at UC Santa Barbara Santa Barbara (săn'tə bär`brə, –bərə), city (1990 pop. 85,571), seat of Santa Barbara co., S Calif., on the Pacific Ocean; inc. 1850. , UCLA UCLA University of California at Los Angeles UCLA University Center for Learning Assistance (Illinois State University) UCLA University of Carrollton, TX and Lower Addison, TX , and USC An abbreviation for U.S. Code. . Once again, science fiction had provided a metaphor to describe the real world of the Internet. The term "zombie A computer that has been covertly taken over in order to perform some nefarious task. It is estimated that millions of PCs around the world have been compromised and, under the control of a third party, routinely transmit messages unbeknownst to the user. " comes from the Voodoo religion, where it refers to both a snake deity and a supernatural power which can reanimate a dead body. This led to the term's use in the West Indies West Indies, archipelago, between North and South America, curving c.2,500 mi (4,020 km) from Florida to the coast of Venezuela and separating the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico from the Atlantic Ocean. to describe a "will-less and speech-less human," only capable of automatic movements and presumably pre·sum·a·ble adj. That can be presumed or taken for granted; reasonable as a supposition: presumable causes of the disaster. raised from the dead by a malevolent spirit (Webster's Ninth Collegiate Dictionary). Zombies in this last sense started populating science fiction movies in the 1960s. The Night of the Living Dead began a series of "Dead" movies where the zombies killed and ate living people and sometimes triumphed at the end of the movie. And so the zombie metaphor was quickly recognized when applied to the computers generating the DoS attacks. These computers were innocent. They had been taken over by an outside spirit (program). They had no will of their own. Their owners, such upright institutions as the University of California The University of California has a combined student body of more than 191,000 students, over 1,340,000 living alumni, and a combined systemwide and campus endowment of just over $7.3 billion (8th largest in the United States). , no longer controlled them. The computers had become zombies. Zombie computers -- a dramatic metaphor which communicates well. It conveys the structure of a complex situation in a simple, colorful phrase. On top of that, it is somewhat humorous, summoning up images of stiff-legged zombies trudging clumsily around the Internet. But, like all metaphors, this one obscures some aspects of the situation as well as illuminating others. After thinking about it for a while, the question came to me: Aren't all computers zombies? As I have argued before, computers have no soul, no essence, no personalities, no spiritual spark (see Gozzi, 1999, sec. 3). The computer fits the definition of a zombie already. It needs animation and purpose from some outside source. In fact, the zombie metaphor turns the programmer into a God-like figure, breathing life (programs) into the inert computer. The opposite of a West Indies zombie is a conscious and aware human being. But the opposite of a zombie computer is not a conscious and aware computer -- this does not exist. The opposite of a zombie computer is a computer which follows the instructions of its owner. The only distinction here seems to be between good zombies versus bad zombies. The Denial of Service attacks ceased the night of Wednesday, Feb. 9, 2000, after Internet portal company Excite was hit. Two months later, police in a Montreal suburb arrested a 15-year-old boy. He went by the online name "Mafiaboy," and he had bragged about the DoS attacks in some hacker chat rooms. The 9th grader was said to be popular. He also played basketball. When Canadian authorities placed a tap on the family phone, they got an earful ear·ful n. 1. An abundant or excessive amount of something heard, such as talk or music. 2. Gossip, especially of an intimate or scandalous nature. 3. A scolding or reprimand. . The boy's father, a bus company executive, was overheard conspiring to assault a business associate. Both father and son were arrested at the same time (Brooke, 2000). At this writing (Summer, 2000), it is thought that others were involved in the DoS attacks. A hacker named "Coolio" is being sought. But no one knows when a similar DoS attack will occur. The Internet remains vulnerable. In June, 2000, a computer security firm discovered a malicious program disguised as a movie clip on over 2000 commercial and home computers. The programs were poised to launch DoS attacks, turning their computers into bad zombies. Potential bad zombie computers were located in Austria, Greece, Canada, Russia, France, and the U.S. ("Hackers poised to strike" 2000). So the bad zombies may attack again. Let's hope the good zombies can hold out against them. (*.) Raymond Gozzi, Jr., is Associate Professor in the Park School of Communications, Ithaca College, Ithaca, NY. His most recent book, The Power of Metaphor in the Age of Electronic Media, Hampton Press, 1999, contains articles from Dr. Gozzi's columns in ETC ETC - ExTendible Compiler. Fortran-like, macro extendible. "ETC - An Extendible Macro-Based Compiler", B.N. Dickman, Proc SJCC 38 (1971). , as well as new chapters on metaphor, and is available from ISGS ISGS Illinois State Geological Survey ISGS Integrated Starter/Generator System . REFERENCES Brooke, J. (April 22, 2000.) Calm scene isn't really, police say. New York New York, state, United States New York, Middle Atlantic state of the United States. It is bordered by Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and the Atlantic Ocean (E), New Jersey and Pennsylvania (S), Lakes Erie and Ontario and the Canadian province of Times, C1. Gozzi, R., Jr. (1999.) The Power of Metaphor in the Age of Electronic Media. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press. Hackers poised to strike, security firm says. (June 9, 2000.) USA Today, available at http://www.usatoday.com/news. Levy, S. & Stone, B. (Feb. 21, 2000.) Hunting the hackers. Newsweek, 135, (8), 38-44. |
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