Internet Founder: One Quarter of World Comptuers Part of Botnet

Vint Cerf, one of the founding fathers of the Internet, gave a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland this week in which he states that the number of computers participating in a bot network is much larger than estimated. In fact, he asserts that his research shows that of the approximately 600 million computers attached to the internet, 150 million may be infected. Cerf says that almost all of these victims are unwitting, "in most cases the owners of these computers have not the slightest idea what their little beige friend in the study is up to."

Bots, for those of you who don't know, are a species of malware that do not actively do anything to the host machine. The exist, much like a sleeper spy, quietly on the host until they are issued a command by a central control. Then they leap into action, working to distribute spam or coordinate distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDoS).

What is the purpose of botnets? Profit, of course. Once a person controls thousands or millions of "little beige friends" then they can be coordinated to deliver goods and services to the nefarious. Botnets have been behind the significant increase in spam over the last few months. Flooded with penny stock offers? Thank the botnets.

These botnets can generate astonishing amounts of network traffic, possibly up to 10-20 Gigabytes per second, that can take down any individual domain or even an entire service provider. Many security vendors are now warning that botnets pose a significant security risk to national government and commercial networks.

Solution? Education of users about proper network usage. Investment in proper security software -- there is no such thing as free security. Vigilance and not treating security issues as a ho-hum affair.