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It looks like the recent outbreak of near zero-day attacks on Windows 2000 systems has degenerated into a bot war between different gangs of system hijackers.
This time it isn't about who can compromise the most machines - it's, as they say, all about the benjamins. Spammers and phishers hire botnets to send their mails, while extortionists use them to run DDOS attacks. Apparently it costs only $350 to hire a network of 5,500 compromised systems...
One thought: if the price is so low because there are so many infected machines out there, then monitoring the market prices for botnets will be a good indicator of how well security systems are working. The less machines infected, the higher the price...
There's also an interesting SFnal thought here. I've been playing with the idea that fast burn singularities are inherently unstable - especially once they've built computronium Matrioshka brains around their home stars. While I've speculated that this instability is due to light speed lag leading to wars over computational resources, there's a possibility in massive (and literal!) identity theft...
This time it isn't about who can compromise the most machines - it's, as they say, all about the benjamins. Spammers and phishers hire botnets to send their mails, while extortionists use them to run DDOS attacks. Apparently it costs only $350 to hire a network of 5,500 compromised systems...
One thought: if the price is so low because there are so many infected machines out there, then monitoring the market prices for botnets will be a good indicator of how well security systems are working. The less machines infected, the higher the price...
There's also an interesting SFnal thought here. I've been playing with the idea that fast burn singularities are inherently unstable - especially once they've built computronium Matrioshka brains around their home stars. While I've speculated that this instability is due to light speed lag leading to wars over computational resources, there's a possibility in massive (and literal!) identity theft...
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