This year Lavasoft celebrates the Halloween season with this ghoulish collection of creepy computer threats: zombie botnets, wriggling worms, and scareware!

Let's start with the spine-chilling botnet, a group of zombie computers which have been breached and controlled by a third party and coordinated to collectively perform the same task, such as sending out spam emails or executing a denial-of-service attack. 

Scareware is the second item in our bestiary of computer threats, it is a form of malware that scares users into believing that there is a virus on their computer to coerce them into buying a fake anti-virus solution. 

A virus is a malicious computer program which infects various parts of the computer’s hard drive and performs harmful actions such as corrupting and modifying files. 

PoS Malware is a malicious program designed to steal customer payment information at point-of-sale terminals such as credit and debit card readers.

A rootkit is a program or set of programs that infects computers and allows an attacker to gain unauthorized access to sensitive parts of the system.

Backdoors are vulnerabilities which allow an attacker to surreptitiously bypass the standard security features of a computer system.

Trojan: a computer virus which infects users by disguising itself as a safe, regular file, such as an email attachment or useful software.  

Worm: a computer virus designed to automatically spread itself to other computers, squirming and wriggling through existing network connections, emails, and instant messages to infect other users.