Botnets: 'the Democratization of Espionage'

The cyber attacks against Google, Adobe and a raft of other top U.S. corporations late last year were by most accounts sophisticated and targeted attempts to steal proprietary data. But lost in all of the resulting media hoopla over who the remaining victims were and whether Chinese hackers or indeed the Chinese government itself were responsible is the simple, terrifying truth that individual hackers now have access to the same arsenal of cyber weapons once reserved only for nation states.

The weapons at issue are, of course, botnets -- agglomerations of remotely controlled, hacked computers that are used for a variety of criminal purposes, from spam, to high-powered, distributed online attacks against virtual targets. In these attacks, the botnets acted as a sort of "cloud" data collection and storage network.

I caught up recently with Roland Dobbins, a solutions architect with the Asia Pacific division of Arbor Networks, a company that specializes in helping customers defend against botnet attacks. Dobbins said the Google (GOOG) incident a perfect example of how the botnet has enabled what he calls the democratization of espionage.