Wadler's Blog

I used to think of grid computing as a coming technology for e-Science. But this article from The New Yorker (10 Oct 2005) shows that grids are here and now, used for spam, identity theft, and cyberextortion. Here is a quote:

The process is called “herding,” and a herd of zombies is called a botnet. The herder then issues orders to the zombies, telling them to send unsolicited e-mail, steal personal information, or launch attacks. Herders also trade, rent, and sell their zombies. “The botnet is the little engine that makes the evil of the Internet work,” Chris Morrow, a senior network-security engineer at M.C.I., said. “It makes spam work. It makes identity fraud work. It makes extortion, in this case, work.”