A bot is NOT a computer
Douglas Schweitzer is a fellow Computerworld security blogger. Most of the time Douglas’ posts are pretty good. But I want to point out an error in his latest post.
Douglas is attempting to answer the question, “What is a bot?” Here is his answer:
For those of you unfamiliar or unsure of the term, a bot’s essentially just another term for an infected computer.
Well, actually, that’s wrong. Here’s my comment to his post:
Actually, it is a common misconception that a bot is the infected computer. The bot is the program that is infecting the computer. Actually, a bot is not necessarily malware. Bots can have legitimate uses, such as spiders that crawl the web for a search engine. Basically, a bot is a program that performs menial tasks that a human doesn’t want to perform or is unable to efficiently perform (even if that means attacking a network or sending spam).
The term “bot” is taking on the same negative connotation that the term “hacker” is taking on, and that is unfortunate. At least a bot doesn’t have feelings.
So I’m not not slamming Douglas here. Just clearing up a common mistake.
Vet
