How to spot a cyberbot – five tips to keep your device safe

By Adrian Winckles, Senior Lecturer, School of Computing and Information Science, Anglia Ruskin University
Andrew Moore, Senior Lecturer Practitioner in Cyber and Networking, Anglia Ruskin University

You may know nothing about it, but your phone – or your laptop or tablet – could be taken over by someone else who has found their way in through a back door. They could have infected your device with malware to make it a “bot” or a “zombie” and be using it – perhaps with hundreds of other unwitting victims’ phones – to launch a cyberattack.

Bot is short for robot. But cyberbots don’t look like the robots of science fiction such as R2-D2. They are software applications that perform repetitive tasks they have been programmed to do. They only become malicious when a human operator (a…

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