Operation Bot Roast

According to CNN, a New Zealand teenager has been questioned in connection with a scheme by hackers to remotely take over more than 1 million computers worldwide and use them for criminal activity, New Zealand police and the FBI said Thursday.

FBI Director Robert Mueller says botnets are "the weapon of choice for cyber criminals."

The FBI has identified at least 2.5 million unsuspecting computer users who have been victims of so-called "botnet" activity. Hackers install viruses, worms and other attack programs that allow them to take over the computers and use them to commit cyber crimes.

Industry numbers suggest there are as many as 5 million infected computers.

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More botnet news.

According to Symantec's most recent Internet Security Threat Report, published in September, the company's sensors detected more than 5 million distinct botnet-infected computers during the first six months of 2007, which represents roughly a 7 percent increase when compared to the same period last year.

More scary news about botnets...

Think your virus scanner is protecting you? Maybe not.

In other news:
The Storm worm botnet has grown so massive and far-reaching that it easily overpowers the world's top supercomputers. Matt Sergeant, chief anti-spam technologist with MessageLabs, recently said in an interview. "If you add up all 500 of the top supercomputers, it blows them all away with just 2 million of its machines. It's very frightening that criminals have access to that much computing power, but there's not much we can do about it."

Oh great.

More about botnets...

Wow, GG feels like she's been under a rock for a few years. I guess I have been too busy trying to use the power of Grid for good not evil.

These botnet thingys are a. pretty prevalent and b. pretty powerful. McAfee says that a botnet took down the infrastructure of a Central American country... I'm sure some of you have some good comebacks for that, but, still, it shows that these botnets are not to be ignored. I think I'm going to spend a little time learning about these. Watch out CIOs worldwide, you could have your Windoze systems on a grid regardless of whether you gave permission or not!

The McAfee Paper
Basic Facts about Botnets

A girl can't catch a break, can she?

Ok, so how is this fair?

"A man who gets angry at work may well be admired for it but a woman who shows anger in the workplace is liable to be seen as "out of control" and incompetent, according to a new study presented on Friday."

See: Angry men get ahead; angry women penalized: study

botnets?

Is your system part of a botnet? How would you know? One more reason I love my Macintosh.

Guardian article on Botnets

I know, I know... it's been a while!

Finally, I have some good news to post! GG got a hybrid! Welcome to the newest member of the family!


On the grid front, I'm still working hard. What doesn't kill you makes you stronger.

Happy Summer!

yes... i am still alive.

Dear Faithful Readers,
I must apologize for my long absence... it has been nothing but insanity here. I just got back from Beijing. Four words of advice: Buy a hybrid car. Do it now, lest our air become as polluted as the air in Beijing. GG suffered an asthma attack of epic proportion in Beijing due to the pollution. It made giving my talk at an internal software convention a bit of a challenge, considering the accompanying laryngitis. Hopefully my raspy voice was considered more sexy than pathetic by the largely male audience. ;-) Anyway, lots going on with grids these days.. hope to get some notes typed up and posted here soon. Thanks for hanging in there!