The Storm Worm Botnet currently infects between one and ten million computers worldwide, which means you have access to an enormous amount of processing power and somewhere between 1 and 10 petabytes of RAM. Apparently, this makes it one of the strongest teams in the world, with more computing power of the ten fastest supercomputers in the world at large.
These estimates interesting, but vague and flaky indeed come from computer scientist Peter Gutman. Although you can choose the numbers easily enough, the guy makes a very interesting observation. While projects like SETI @ Home can harness a lot of computing power, a virus or worm that does not have to ask permission from a user could possibly be more powerful. Imagine the potential if virus writers found more interesting things to do with the cycles of sending spam.
These estimates interesting, but vague and flaky indeed come from computer scientist Peter Gutman. Although you can choose the numbers easily enough, the guy makes a very interesting observation. While projects like SETI @ Home can harness a lot of computing power, a virus or worm that does not have to ask permission from a user could possibly be more powerful. Imagine the potential if virus writers found more interesting things to do with the cycles of sending spam.
Does the first person to find extraterrestrial signals be an amateur hacker, rather than Seti? Complex solutions could folding of proteins found by bored crackers? And the benevolent act of finding a cure for genetic disease are greater than malicious acts of creating the worm that surrounded the processing cycles required to do so?
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