Condoms for Computers-Required.

Heather said: "From Yahoo News: 7,000 Bots McAfee researchers estimate that there are more than 7,000 bots in existence today, growing at a rate of about 150 to 200 per week. A bot is an automated program that answers to commands from another source. The anti-virus company said that some bots are less pervasive than others, but warned of a recent trend toward bots that download adware onto a user's system. These programs also have the ability to propagate quickly on the compromised PC. "Like any evolving security threat, the writers of these intrusive programs continue to develop new variants that propagate on systems that do not have proactive protection against buffer overflows," Avert says in a statement. "Proactive generic protection is becoming imperative." Avert also says that spyware and adware are becoming an increasing concern, with an average of at least 13 adware components found on every computer. Better protect yourself!"

Darksat said: "I assume they mean 7000 types of bots, as I know of people who have about 15000 bots in thier inventory."

Heather said: "Dang. That is a big "inventory" of bots! I assume some are "sweep" bots?"

edwin said: "the internet is a very, very hostile place these days. and it's getting worse all the time."

Darksat said: "Information warfare, the next front line and it has yet to even fully evolve."

edwin said: "its the most obvious form of warfare. and its one where terrorists have a chance. if they can disrupt commerce, they can disrupt society."

Darksat said: "Edwin, normally I agree with you on a lot of stuff but there I have to diagree, on a couple of points. (1)Terorisim/Gurilla Warfare, depending on whose side your on has a long history of producing results, either political or militarily. (2)Most terrorists dont have the ability to set up established IT warefare centers such as North Korea, USA, Russia, UK, Israel, etc have, it takes more than some kid in a basement for effective information warefare, you need high speed connections, Satalite communications equipment, Large scale computer clusters for breaking encryption. Sure some kids in a basement an do a bit of dammage but to seriously dammage an entire nations IT infrastructure requires large teams of hackers with a developed support inteligence and communications infrastructure. at the moment most terrorist entities have little or no IT experience and generally draw thier ranks from the less educated lower class of society. The technical people they do have are generally poorly educated wannabe script kiddies. Where IT warefare will come into its own is giving small nations the ability to compete with larger superpowers, and its currently an area the english speaking world has a distinct disadvantage in. EG all North Korean hackers speak english yet the NSA's IT warfare division has only 6 people who speak Korean on its payrole. however your last point was correct, commerce and communications will be the main targets in any IT conflict."