Better to Have a Botnet in Front of Me Than a Frontal Lobotomy!

Vint Cerf wasn’t kidding when he warned attendees at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, last year that the Internet is at serious risk from botnets. These vast networks of compromised PCs–used by criminals for sending spam and spyware and for launching denial-of-service attacks–are a very real and quickly evolving problem. To wit, the FBI’s announcement yesterday that its OPERATION BOT ROAST initiative has identified some 1 million compromised PCs.

Unsettling, isn’t it? The thought of a million machines sitting in homes, schools and businesses around the country just waiting to spew out some nasty piece of malware or the latest “pump and dump” stock scheme. Depressing, too. Said Gadi Evron, who coordinates an international volunteer effort to fight botnets, “The war to make the Internet safe was lost long ago, and we need to figure out what to do now.”