by Bharath Mohan

Created on: November 01, 2010

On the 20th of this month, a computer specialist in Arizona admitted to spreading scam e-mail for a "pump and dump" of 2 stocks. What is interesting about it is that him and other people banded together to hack computers all over the world to create an army, known as a botnet. These so-called "zombie computers" would then send the spam to all the contacts in their address book, thereby creating an easy and efficient way to spread the message. His penalty is up to five years in prison and $250,000 in fines. Other statistics show that more than 70% of websites currently have security flaws, and there are almost 250,000 attempts annually to break into US government systems, of which 45-65% are successful, though not on a massive scale. 

When such statistics are rampant on the information superhighway, it is obvious why home users and small business managers alike might feel insecure, and they have every right to.

If you have been hacked, you should know that if you have a properly configured firewall and antivirus installed, your loss of control was likely not your fault; rather, it was the fault of the software vendor for putting exploitable code in their software.

The first thing you should do is try to find the identity of your hacker. This could be as simple as trying to find an unauthorized program running on your computer to attempting to find all outgoing connections from your computer. Oftentimes, in order to regain connection at a later time, a hacker will install a backdoor on your computer, and simply by finding it, you might be able to find out what the program is intended to do and where its results are sent. However, an expert hacker will hide this as an in-obtrusive and sometimes helpful program, so you may have to use command prompt. When you need to do this, press the Windows button + R (for simplicity's sake I will assume you are using windows.) In the small window that pops up, type in cmd and hit enter. This will open up a command prompt window. In this black box, first you should type in "ipconfig". Note down any 4-number combinations you notice separated by periods (Example, something like 10.10.10.10 (NOT A REAL IP ADDRESS!)). Next, type in "netstat". It may take a while to load up, but soon you will see a list of all outgoing connections from your computer. Ignore any that list any of the IP addresses you noted down in the previous step. Also ignore the IP address 127.0.0.1 (This IP Address is what is known as a "Reserved Address",

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