Along with vampires and werewolves, the stock of zombies has risen hugely in popular culture over the last few decades—a trend that has culminated, thus far, in creations as varied as a bestselling fitness app for smartphones entitled “Zombies, Run!” (which encourages its users to go for runs while listening to an interactive narrative in which fictional zombies chase them) and leisure experiences like “Zombie Shopping Mall,” in which punters pay to take part in a live-action day of “real” zombie fighting at a specially hired shopping mall, complete with actors and copious quantities of fake blood.
Etymologically, zombie entered the English language via the creole spoken on the island of Haiti—a language born in turn from the mixing of colonial French with some of the African languages spoken by slaves brought to the island. In Haitian creole, the word zonbi denoted a dead body brought back to life by supernatural means—a word derived in turn from the Bantu language Kimbundu, where the term nzumbi described the spirit of the dead, as well as suggesting a connection to the animating spirit of a West African god in the form of a boa constrictor.
Thanks to Haiti’s voodoo cult, zombies developed a rich mythos, including the notion of a “zombie master” using magic and hallucinogenic drugs to keep both the dead and the living under a spell of mindless control. And, unlikely as it may sound, it’s in this sense that the notion of zombies has most successfully crossed over from popular culture to the more specialized world of computing.
A “zombie computer” is one that, unknown to its owner, has been infected with malicious software that allows a distant “zombie master” to control it, along with potentially thousands of other machines similarly affected. The term arose in the early 2000s as a tongue-in-cheek way of describing the serious issue of what are more properly known as botnets—networks of compromised computers acting as bots (that is, automated robots) for a person or persons usually engaged in criminal or destructive behavior. These controllers, similarly, are more properly called bot masters or bot herders.
Botnets are, today, a serious business for those operating on the darker side of the internet. Typically, they are used to send out spam emails—a sufficient number of compromised machines can be used to spew out millions of untraceable messages each day—or to mount so called DDoS attacks. Standing for “distributed denial of service,” these attacks entail instructing a zombie network of computers to connect repeatedly to a particular website or service, causing a huge increase in demand that almost invariably brings the target site crashing down.
The world’s largest botnets can consist of hundreds of thousands of compromised machines, use of which may be hired out to the highest bidder by their operators, or made a formal aspect of a criminal enterprise. “Night of the living dead computers” may not have quite the same ring as the film original—but it represents a far more imminent threat to human health and sanity, as well as an excellent reason for keeping an eye on your own system’s digital health.