A zombie is a reanimated human corpse. Stories of zombies originated in the Afro-Caribbean spiritual belief system of Vodou, which told of the people being controlled as laborers by a powerful sorcerer. Zombies became a popular device in modern horror fiction, largely because of the success of George A. Romero‘s 1968 film Night of the Living Dead.
There are several possible etymologies of the word zombie. One possible origin is jumbie, the West Indian term for “ghost”.[1] Another is nzambi, the Kongo word meaning “spirit of a dead person.”[1] According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, the word entered English circa 1871; it’s derived from the Louisiana Creole or Haitian Creole zonbi, which in turn is of Bantu origin.[2] A zonbi is a person who is believed to have died and been brought back to life without speech or free will.[3] It is akin to the Kimbundu nzúmbe ghost.
FOLKLORE
In the Middle Ages, it was commonly believed that the souls of the dead could return to earth and haunt the living. The belief in revenants (someone who has returned from the dead) is well documented by contemporary European writers of the time, such as William of Newburgh and Walter Map. According to the Encyclopedia of Things that Never Were[6], particularly in France during the Middle Ages, the revenant rises from the dead usually to avenge some crime committed against the entity, most likely a murder. The revenant usually took on the form of an emaciated corpse or skeletal human figure, and wandered around graveyards at night. The “draugr” of medieval Norse mythology were also believed to be the corpses of warriors returned from the dead to attack the living. The zombie appears in several other cultures worldwide, including China, Japan, the Pacific, India, Persia, the Arabs, and the Native Americans.
ZOMBIES IN MODERN TIMES
Zombies from George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, considered by many to be one of the definitive zombie films
Modern zombies, as portrayed in books, films, games, and haunted attractions, are quite different from both voodoo zombies and those of folklore. Modern zombies are typically depicted in popular culture as mindless, unfeeling monsters with a hunger for human brains and flesh, a prototype established in the seminal 1968 film Night of the Living Dead. Typically, these creatures can sustain damage far beyond that of a normal, living human (generally these can only be killed by a wound to the head, such as a headshot) and can pass whatever syndrome that causes their condition onto others.
Usually, zombies are not depicted as thralls to masters, as in the film White Zombie or the spirit-cult myths. Rather, modern zombies are depicted in mobs and waves, seeking either flesh to eat or people to kill or infect, and are typically rendered to exhibit signs of physical decomposition such as rotting flesh, discolored eyes, and open wounds, and moving with a slow, shambling gait. They are generally incapable of communication and show no signs of personality or rationality, though George Romero’s zombies appear capable of learning and very basic levels of speech as seen in the films Day of the Dead and Land of the Dead.
Modern zombies are closely tied to the idea of a zombie apocalypse, the collapse of civilization caused by a vast plague of undead. The ideas are now so strongly linked that zombies are rarely depicted within any other context.
There are still significant differences among the depictions of zombies by various media; for one comparison see the contrasts between zombies by Night of the Living Dead authors George A. Romero and John A. Russo as they evolved in the two separate film series that followed. In some zombie apocalypse narratives, such as The Return of the Living Dead and Dead Set, zombies are depicted as being superhumanly quick and nimble, a further departure from the established genre stereotype.
PHILOSOPICAL ZOMBIE
A philosophical zombie is a concept used in the philosophy of mind, a field of research which examines the association between conscious thought and the physical world. A philosophical zombie is a hypothetical person who lacks full consciousness but has the biology or behavior of a normal human being; it is used as a null hypothesis in debates regarding the identity of the mind and the brain. The term was coined by philosopher David Chalmers. [7]
SOCIAL ACTIVISM
Some zombie fans continue the George A. Romero tradition of using zombies as a social commentary. Organized zombie walks, which are primarily promoted through word of mouth, are regularly staged in some countries. Usually they are arranged as a sort of surrealist performance art but they are occasionally put on as part of a unique political protest.[8]
Other organizations such as Zombie Squad use the genre as a way to promote disaster preparedness and to encourage horror fans to become involved in their community, through volunteering or hosting zombie themed charity fundraisers.
ZOMBIE COMPUTER
A zombie computer (often shortened as zombie) is a computer attached to the Internet that has been compromised by a hacker, a computer virus, or a trojan horse. Generally, a compromised machine is only one of many in a botnet, and will be used to perform malicious tasks of one sort or another under remote direction. Most owners of zombie computers are unaware that their system is being used in this way. Because the owner tends to be unaware, these computers are metaphorically compared to zombies.
(1) Spammer’s web site (2) Spammer (3) Spamware (4) Infected computers (5) Virus or trojan (6) Mail servers (7) Users (8) Web traffic
Zombies have been used extensively to send e-mail spam; as of 2005, an estimated 50–80% of all spam worldwide was sent by zombie computers.[1] This allows spammers to avoid detection and presumably reduces their bandwidth costs, since the owners of zombies pay for their own bandwidth. This spam also greatly furthers the spread of Trojan horses; as Trojans are not self-replicating like viruses or worms, they rely on the movement of e-mails or spam to grow.[2]
For similar reasons zombies are also used to commit click fraud against sites displaying pay per click advertising. Others can host phishing or money mule recruiting websites.
Zombies can be used to conduct distributed denial-of-service attacks, a term which refers to the orchestrated flooding of target websites by armies of zombie computers. The large number of Internet users making simultaneous requests of a website’s server are intended to result in crashing and the prevention of legitimate users from accessing the site.[3] A variant of this type of flooding is known as distributed degradation-of-service. Committed by “pulsing” zombies, distributed degradation-of-service is the moderated and periodical flooding of websites, done with the intent of slowing down rather than crashing a victim site. The effectiveness of this tactic springs from the fact that intense flooding can be quickly detected and remedied, but pulsing zombie attacks and the resulting slow-down in website access can go unnoticed for months and even years.[4]
Notable incidents of distributed denial- and degradation-of-service attacks in past include the attack upon the SPEWS service in 2003, and the one against Blue Frog service in 2006. In 2000, several prominent Web sites (Yahoo, eBay, etc) were clogged to a standstill by a distributed denial of service attack mounted by a Canadian teenager. An attack on grc.com is discussed at length, and the perpetrator, a 13-year old probably from Kenosha, Wisconsin, was identified on the Gibson Research Web site. Steve Gibson disassembled a ‘bot’ which was a zombie used in the attack, and traced it to its distributor. In his account about his research, he describes the operation of a ‘bot’-controlling IRC channel.[5]
Network Intrusion-prevention systems (NIPS) are usually useful for preventing, detecting and blocking zombie computers.[6]
Computer users frequently perform backups and delete suspicious mail messages as preventive measures against infection. [7](from wikipedia)
