The World's Biggest Botnets

ancientribe writes "There's a new peer-to-peer based botnet emerging that could blow the notorious Storm away in size and sophistication, according to researchers, and it's a direct result of how Storm has changed the botnet game, with more powerful and wily botnets on the horizon. This article provides a peek at the 'new Storm' and reveals the three biggest botnets in the world (including Storm) — and what makes them tick and what they are after."

Comments

Imagine if you will

[Misanthrope]

Imagine if somebody did this but donated cpu time to distributed computing projects like that one on cancer research. Force philanthropy would be rather strange and still illegal, but at least slightly more noble in a Robin Hood sort of way.

Age discrimination and I object!

[SL Baur]

From TFA:

They have young, talented programmers apparently. If you want me to put it harshly ... "young" programmers and "young" technical managers at Microsoft who signed off on ActiveX et al, are totally at blame for the problem. We, the more elderly of the communty who programmed the internet in the first place, discarded executable content over the wire. Unshar was written for a reason!

The sophistication of this Storm "application" is much more indicative of a mature elder programmer, who probably has read the complete cypherpunks archives. We talked about stuff like this long ago. Compare to things like the Morris worm, the two Manila children, etc. Those were intense, but brief due to coding errors and the like.

Bah. No, these people are not children and they do know what they're doing.