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Storm Worm More Powerful Than Top Supercomputers
Stony Stevenson writes to mention that some security researchers are claiming that the Storm Worm has grown so massive that it could rival the world's top supercomputers in terms of raw power. "Sergeant said researchers at MessageLabs see about 2 million different computers in the botnet sending out spam on any given day, and he adds that he estimates the botnet generally is operating at about 10 percent of capacity. 'We've seen spikes where the owner is experimenting with something and those spikes are usually five to 10 times what we normally see,' he said, noting he suspects the botnet could be as large as 50 million computers. 'That means they can turn on the taps whenever they want to.'"
Where's Paul Atredies when you need him?
Imagine a beowulf clus.... never mind.
Anonymous Coward: "This is slashdot. Accuracy is second class citizen here, unlike King Bias."
the likes of which even God has never seen.
Oh, yeah, it's not easy to pad these out to 120 characters.
Is there some kind of standardized performance metric for sending spam messages? Might be that supercomputers are super at that particular problem and would beat a botnet. Give me numbers people! IBM, come on, you built a machine to play chess, now build the ultimate spam bot!
I was unable to find this worm in Gentoo's portage tree. When do we get our ebuilds? Yet again, it is a discrimination for all Linux people.
I'll tell you - as long as there are no worms for GNU/Linux, we won't see the masses converting to free operation system! RMS has to write a Gworm at last! If an open-source worm beats closed and proprietary Storm Worm this will be a clear indication of superiority of FLOSS!
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
wow
While it might be more powerful than machines on the TOP500 in terms of raw number-crunching ability, it lacks any sort of high-speed interconnect for message passing. The latency issue would make for poor benchmark results in most "supercomputer" type tests (Linpack, etc.)
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Zapp Brannigan, is that you?
As long as it means operating the escape key with one of Angelinas boobies, I'm all for it !
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
Exam 4/C again. Maybe I'll do better this time.
I know dude, tell me about it. It seems like everyone in the world knows my cock is small and wants to sell me herbal enhancements . And now that I think about it, I've never even met a terrrorist.
Just think if this loss of self-confidence spreads. Tomorrow it may be you getting e-mails about your small cock. And so on and so forth. Why, next week everyone identifying themselves as part of Western civilzation may get this ego popping email,
And though I've little experience in the matter, since I always pay for my lavatory visits, there are very few of us who are more hugely weightier than federal
Don't worry about the mule, just load the wagon.
Completely wrong!
It's a conspiracy. The Pentagon is using the spam to cover up the fact that this new worm has been created by them with the help of Microsoft. When the worm reaches critical mass, they will focus their computing power and finally be able to figure out a strategy for stabilizing Iraq.
It's going to be a big let down, however, when the worm just spits out "42."
This would cause a bleu screen of death on said rouge nodes.
"There is nothing nice about Steve Jobs and nothing evil about Bill Gates." - Chuck Peddle
Come to think of it, StormWorm is easy to fix too... Just make everyone who is running any flavor of Windows install gentoo - then the worm is gone, they have acquired some technical skill, AND undergone a painful punishment that should deter the end user from ever allowing their system to become infected. Everyone wins!
A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.
Yes, but pigs will begin flying at around the 24 hour mark and hell is most likely to freeze over somewhere around the 36 hour mark.
That's not a fair comparison. World of Warcraft trains people in important social skills, like teabagging and harshing on newbies.
Or they could hire Ninjas.
What if the botnet was for good? The ends justifying the means. What if the botnet was weilded to provide free open internet access to all people in all countries reguardless of what their government wanted? What if the botnet was used map the human genome, ultimatly leading to cures/vaciens to things like aids and cancer and priapism? Is there a glass half full to this? skip
We all love to blame Microsoft, and I certainly do too. But there's another party who's even more responsible, and it surprises me they never get mentioned. Who are these foul malefactors? Why, Unix gods Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie, for using null-terminated strings in C. It's ridiculous on its face: a variable-size data structure with no bounds checking! Null-terminated strings -- unless used very, very carefully, which was certainly not part of the early Unix ethos -- give malicious parties hundreds of ways to crash programs, many of which can also be used to take over the process.
I know. Machines were so small back then, and null-terminated strings are soooo convenient. Still it was a disastrous engineering decision, and it's time people started saying so.
Your god may be dead, but mine aren't!
....And in 2009, the massive botnet revealed itself as a nascient artificial intelligence. It had been active since 2005 but had been biding it's time while it was gathering additional nodes to increase redundancy and add to it's own processing capability....