I thought this was interesting - showing just how much cyber crime there really is. Cyber crime is bigger than the drug trade!?! Whoa boy!
It's amazing how many people in the world own a reasonable PC that is connected to a fast / Broadband internet connection that have no idea their machine is compromised.
The internet is a fertile field for techno master-crims and their enslaved laptop-dancers wreaking DDOS havoc. I know because I fear I'm one of those slaves!
I am worried that I may be a zombie. It's nothing specific or obvious to onlookers yet, but I guess I wouldn't know or care if it was.
I'm not walking funny or taking on the signature pasty complexion of the undead. And if I have infected some of my friends, please accept that I would be truly sorry if my emotional responses were not instructed by another.
It's those instructions that have Bluestone thinking there is some virtual voodoo at play here, my email inbox is lousy with them and each day there are more. I may be waiting for the ultimate directive, a good-to-go sign on my part in global destruction.
In the meantime they, (whoever they are) seem to know my secret anxieties about money, property and cheap computer software, but most of all they are casting aspersions on my male endowment. I never used to worry about such things but it can get to you after a while, receiving a daily stream of emails with titles like: "Is that all you've got?", "She's laughing at you little boy" or less prosaically "Hey Needle Dick!" It's hurtful and totally unnecessary.
Fortunately, I had a long talk to the man who runs the internet this morning and he has reassured me greatly. About the internet, that is. The other problem may require years of therapy, if not surgery.
Dr Paul Twomey, 46, is the president of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). Twomey doesn't actually run the internet, nobody does. ICANN is a not-for-profit company responsible for the global co-ordination of the internet's system of unique identifiers. This includes domain names and the addresses used in a variety of internet protocols. Computers use these identifiers to reach each other over the net.
ICANN's global stakeholders meet regularly to develop policies that ensure the net's ongoing security and stability. Twomey tried to explain this to his Dad up in Dalby in western Queensland but he still tells his mates round town that young Paul runs the internet. But no he can't do anything about the porn, Twomey senior says.
If there was no ICANN, the internet would still run tomorrow but perhaps not next month, says Twomey Jnr. This inorganic beast needs no central control, no heart or brain but Twomey says ICANN is like the nervous system, providing some feedback to the world when problems like the zombie thing come up.
It's possible that an evil "botnet" has added this laptop to a network of "zombie" computers which follows his every command. (He's responsible for all the spelling and grammatical errors.) Imagine a botnet as the head of a crime family who commands total obedience from his team of zombies. Any computer the botnet can infiltrate becomes one of his zombies.
The control may be as minor as directing you to spam all the people in your contact book with the same junk emails you have been getting. Annoying - but hardly world ending. Where it becomes more sinister is where an army of zombies is used in co-ordinated assaults on major public and private computer networks, otherwise known as Distributed Denials of Service (DDOS).
In a DDOS, the zombies attack the target server en masse which, under a withering assault, simply can't cope and shuts down. It's the new global standover racket, says Twomey.
A bank or a major corporation experiences an attack or two of the killer zombies and they will pay anything to avoid it, says Twomey. And a number of major corporates, particularly in Europe, are paying this extortion money every week, no questions asked.
Traditional standover has limitations as a business. You can standover a street or two, maybe even a suburb, if you have enough muscle. But beyond that scale your capacity to enforce becomes largely theoretical. Challenges come thick and fast. Without resort to real violence, the standover man soon gets stoodover.
But on the internet, the world is your neighbourhood. Twomey says there is now a nexus between botnets and organised crime. Botnets, mostly based in eastern Europe and north Asia can rent out their zombies to third party crooks seeking to mount their own DDOS attacks.
As if being a zombie is not bad enough, I may one day become a slave zombie, a hapless virtual soldier in an attack on a bank or an insurance company. At least if the botnet offered to whack up some of the proceeds it wouldn't be so bad, but that isn't how this thing works. My zombie will may be only worth a dime to some botnet in Eastern Europe.
What's really scary is that the next version of the internet promises an explosion of the potential zombie population. Currently there are 4.2 billion addresses on the net, in version 6, there will be 340 trillion trillion trillion, if one can grasp such a number.
Already cyber crime has outstripped the global drug trade in value. With virtually every household appliance from the fridge to the garden watering system to every component of every piece of manufacture soon to have its own web address, the potential for virtual villainy is truly epic. Attacks on supply chains in private sector industry could even prevent governments mobilising its national assets in times of war. That's the downside of allowing private companies to control the military supply chain.
ICANN can't stop any of this, it can only alert us. It controls one of the 150 root servers that lie at the heart of the internet but it has no capacity to regulate. All over the world botnets are gathering their zombies ready for the DDOS attacks. In version 6, when daily life is controlled by the internet the final battle shall be joined. Beloved botnet, I await your will and whim.
