How To Check If Your Computer is a Part of a Botnet

Is your computer running slowly? Or perhaps it is acting strangely? Is your email sending messages to contacts in your address book? Do your friends  recieve emails from you that you did not send?  This is rather annoying and quite embarrassing especially with messages that contain in appropriate contents, malwares and viruses. 

If this is the case, your computer might have been attacked with a trojan horse or other computer viruses which in effect turned your machine into a computer "robot" or bot that  have been set up to forward transmissions (including spam or viruses) to other computers on the internet. Your zombie computer then serves the wishes of some master spam or virus originator.  Most computers compromised in this way are home-based. 

How do you know if you are a part of a bot net? 

Botnetchecker.com lets you check if your computer has been detected in a sort of a trap set to capture the IP addresses of computers spotted exhibiting botnet-like behaviour. The site reads your IP address (as all websites do, including prakticality) as you visit http://www.botnetchecker.com and compares it to list of recently trapped bots. If nothing is found, it will give you a "no activity detected" message (screen shot below).

If your IP address has recently flagged, BotNetChecker.com will let you know so you can address the issue.

 So it is really a good idea for your firewall and other security protections to be active while online. Antiviruses like AVG and Avast have free versions that are excellent in providing peace of mind when it comes to viruses, trojans,  malwares, rootkits, and other internet nasties protection.