Definition: botnet

(roBOT NETwork) Also called a "zombie army," a botnet is a large number of compromised computers that are used to generate spam, relay viruses or flood a network or Web server with excessive requests to cause it to fail (see denial-of-service attack). The computer is compromised via a Trojan that often works by opening an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channel that waits for commands from the person in control of the botnet. There is a thriving botnet business selling lists of compromised computers to hackers and spammers. See voluntary botnet, botcloud, spambot, zombie and spam 2.0.