Syzdekistan

Wikipedia’s article of the day a few days ago was The Storm Botnet and it was a fascinating read. I follow computer security pretty closely and knew the general concept of Botnets. A botnet is a group of unsuspecting computers doing the bidding of computer crackers. Typically, a Windows machine gets infected somehow and then is controlled by remote control. Typically, they are used to send spam, participate in a DDOS attack, or phishing attempts. The scary thing is how huge this thing was thought to be. In September 2007 it contained from between 160,000 computers to over a million computers. Imagine how quickly your website will go down if even a small portion of those computers start flooding your site with data. Even scarier, is that security researchers report being attacked when they try to characterize this botnet. It defends itself by flooding the prober’s website with a flood of data. It’s scary that criminals have access to such computer power.