Criminals ‘may overwhelm the web’
Up to a quarter of computers on the net may be used by cyber criminals in so-called botnets, said Vint Cerf, one of the fathers of the internet.
Of the 600 million computers currently on the internet, between 100 and 150 million were already part of these botnets, Mr Cerf said.
While most owners are oblivious to the infection, the networks of tens of thousands of computers are used to launch spam e-mail campaigns, denial-of-service attacks or online fraud schemes.
Mr Markoff, who writes for the New York Times, said that a single botnet at one point used up about 15% of Yahoo’s search capacity.