Virus Bulletin - The World Of Botnets [PDF Document]

With a Trojan horse on one compromised computer, you would be able to do whatever you wanted. That computer would be as good as your own. You would own it. Now imagine that you owned 100,000 such computers, scattered all over the world, each one running and being looked after in someone’s home, office, or school. Imagine that with just one command, you could tell all of these computers to do whatever you wanted.

You could tell them to access the same website simultaneously, to search for security weaknesses in nearby computers, or just to send out large amounts of spam. If you sent out one spam message from each computer every second, you could send a million pieces of spam in ten seconds; hundreds of millions per hour. You would effectively be in command of an army of robots, or bots for short. The actions taken by these bots would appear to be the actions of the individuals whose computers were compromised.

This article has been taken from Virus Bulletin