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.

Zombies are widely used to relay spam so that messages come from thousands of different IP addresses, avoiding detection and expanding volume at the same time.

Denial of Service

Before spam became such a popular pastime, zombies were used to transmit phony messages to a server in order to slow down service and disrupt the network. A "pulsing zombie" is one that sends bogus messages in periodic bursts rather than continuously, once again, to avoid detection. See spam, denial of service attack and botnet.

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1. [Unix] A process that has died but has not yet relinquished its process table slot (because the parent process hasn't executed a wait(2) for it yet). These can be seen in ps(1) listings occasionally. Compare orphan.

2. A machine, especially someone's home box, that has been cracked and is being used as part of a second-stage attack by miscreants trying to mask their home IP address. Especially used of machines being exploited in large gangs for a mechanized denial-of-service attack like Tribe Flood Network; the image that goes with this is of a veritable army of zombies mindlessly doing the bidding of a necromancer.