Pulsing Zombie

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What Does Pulsing Zombie Mean?

A pulsing zombie is a degradation-of-service attack that occurs when a hacker maliciously targets a system and compromises computer security by sending a steady stream of attacks over a long period of time. Pulsing zombie attacks generally occur without the website users’ knowledge. Although pulsing zombie attacks weaken system performance, they do not shut down systems like with a typical denial-of-service attacks.

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Techopedia Explains Pulsing Zombie

Pulsing zombies are designed to degrade website operations and efficiency. Pulsing zombies intermittently barrage a targeted website with traffic, impacting website performance and creating noticeably compromised user capabilities. Although the individual barrages are short-lived, pulsing zombies slow responsiveness of the target.

They are difficult to disarm because of their potential to continue for long periods of time without detection. In addition, pulsing zombie attacks appear to be benign because they do not inflict catastrophic harm.

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Margaret Rouse
Technology Expert
Margaret Rouse
Technology Expert

Margaret is an award-winning technical writer and teacher known for her ability to explain complex technical subjects to a non-technical business audience. Over the past twenty years, her IT definitions have been published by Que in an encyclopedia of technology terms and cited in articles by the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and Discovery Magazine. She joined Techopedia in 2011. Margaret's idea of a fun day is helping IT and business professionals learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.