I'd loan them the extra cycles

[alxian]

if an equitable payment plan could be arranged

 

Experts are warning that the sharp rise in malware activity this week is being caused by hacking groups competing with each other to create large botnets of remote controlled PCs.

The worm attacks on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday appear to come from three distinct hacking groups according to Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer at F-Secure.

"We seem to have a botwar on our hands," he said.

"There appear to be three different virus writing gangs turning out new worms at an alarming rate – it's as if they are competing to see who will build the biggest network of infected machines. The latest variants of Bozori even remove competing viruses like Zotob from the machines!"

 

What has made these worms different is the speed with which they were created. Microsoft released its patches on August 9 and the patches had been reverse engineered and exploit code was released by August 12. Since then three distinct worm types have exploited the vulnerability.

"Organised criminal gangs are behind attacks like these and their motive is to make money," said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos.

"Owning a large network of compromised computers is a valuable asset to these criminals and every business needs to take steps to ensure they are not the next victim on their list."

Experts are expecting a busy week ahead as the pool of unpatched PCs still remains a tempting target for hackers as many individuals and organisations have yet to finish the testing and installation of the new code.

[nemo]

This is not a new phenomenon. Bot wars have been around for quite some time. The 'alarming rate' that is somehow surprising the dimwit at Sophos (they used to make a good product) is the result of a few collaboration efforts at using clusters and distributed computing to reverse engineer patches - an old idea finally made possible through more reliable and simpler implementations of cluster computing. There are clusters available now that use Knoppix run-live CDs - boot and compute; it's that simple and fast. Personally, I like the technology...

 

There are several diminutive Linux distros that can be booted from a run-live CD, and then loaded completely into memory, freeing up the CD drive for burning data. If you were to modify one of those distros in the Knoppix cluster fashion, a possible scenario would be:

X number of machines with 1G memory (pretty reasonable)

Each machine is running the entire operating system out of 210M of RAM.

Every computation is held completely in memory; the bottleneck is now the data transfer rate among machines.

Fiber (in the lengths you would use for a one / two room cluster) is cheap.

 

Sounds fun.

[alxian]

makes you wonder what comes after fiber.. would room temp superconducting wire offer any real bandwidth increase?

 

like the processors talking to each other as though they were on the same motherboard.