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The World's Biggest Botnets

What makes three of today's largest botnets tick, what they're after and a peek at the 'next' Storm
NOVEMBER 8, 2007 |
By Kelly Jackson HigginsSenior Editor, Dark Reading

You know about the Storm Trojan, which is spread by the world's largest botnet. But what you may not know is there's now a new peer-to-peer based botnet emerging that could blow Storm away.

"We're investigating a new peer-to-peer botnet that may wind up rivaling Storm in size and sophistication," says Tripp Cox, vice president of engineering for startup Damballa, which tracks botnet command and control infrastructures. "We can't say much more about it, but we can tell it's distinct from Storm.

"It's hard to imagine anything bigger and more complex than Storm, which despite its nefarious intent as a DDOS and spam tool has awed security researchers with its slick design and its ability to reinvent itself when it's at risk of detection or getting busted. Storm changed the botnet game, security experts say, and its successors may be even more powerful and wily. (See Attackers Hide in Fast Flux and Researchers Fear Reprisals From Storm.)

Botnets are no longer just annoying, spam-pumping factories -- they're big business for criminals. This shift has even awakened enterprises, which historically have either looked the other way or been in denial about bots infiltrating their organizations. (See Bots Rise in the Enterprise.)

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/...

Gasperini's team says that the basin's unusual shape is the result of a fragment thrown from the Tunguska explosion that plowed into the ground, leaving a long, trenchlike depression.

"If the body was an asteroid, a surviving fragment may be buried beneath the lake. If it was a comet, its chemical signature should be found in the deepest layers of sediments."

http://www.sciam.com/print_version.cfm?articl...

October 03, 2007Searching for God in the BrainResearchers are unearthing the roots of religious feeling in the neural commotion that accompanies the spiritual epiphanies of nuns, Buddhists and other people of faithBy David BielloThe doughnut-shaped machine swallows the nun, who is outfitted in a plain T-shirt and loose hospital pants rather than her usual brown habit and long veil. She wears earplugs and rests her head on foam cushions to dampen the device’s roar, as loud as a jet engine. Supercooled giant magnets generate intense fields around the nun’s head in a high-tech attempt to read her mind as she communes with her deity.