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
I honestly don’t know who David is and quite honestly, his comment was quite lame. Anyway, it is humbling to know that someone other than my wife and kids “worships” me!
Cheers!
What the hell does that have to do with the price of tea in China? Do you worship Douglas or something?
Michael
And how many computer security books have you written? That’s what I thought…