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CSC 101 Introduction to Computers
Fall 2010
Article Summary Example
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Storm worm botnet more powerful than top supercomputers
Sharon Gaudin, ITNews, September 7, 2007
A computer worm called Storm has created a grid of zombie computers running
Microsoft Windows that has more processing power than the world's top
supercomputer. While researchers do not agree on the size of the zombie grid,
they do agree that this is the largest grid they have seen and is capable of
doing much damage.
Research have been observing about two million computers in the botnet sending
out spam daily, but spikes in the observed traffic lead researchers to believe
that the grid may have as many as fifty million computers. More troubling is
the fact that the criminals who own the botnet have the ability to turn on and
off that much computing power. Adam Swindler, a senior manager with security
company, Postini, believe that if there were a chess game between the Storm
botnet and IBM's supercomputer, BlueGene, the Storm botnet would win hands down.
What all this means is that there exists a group of cyber criminals who have the
destructive computing power that could launch a attack such as one seen earlier
this year in Estonia, that shut down government, business, media, and police web
sites. Swindler raises the issue of an enemy of a country renting the botnet to
launch a Denial of Service attack against government and financial centers.
Finally, the creators of Storm have developed a way to attack anyone, including
individual researchers, who try to exam the program. The Storm authors, besides
using the botnet to send out billions of messages per day, are pump-and-dump
scams to make money.
I chose this article because of my interest computer forensics and cyber
terrorism. I find it mind-boggling that by using a group of small, low
computing power pc's a group of cyber criminals can create more computing power
than the biggest supercomputer. It is truly frightening to think of the
potential damage and havoc to the United States economy and government that this
botnet could cause if the Storm grid were used by our enemies for a cyber
terrorism attack. At this time, the article paints a grim picture of security
experts being able to contain this threat or bring those who initiated it to
justice.