Bill Schneier has an interesting write-up about the Storm worm/botnet/virus/trojan/thingumy. I can’t help but be massively impressed with this from a purely technical perspective. As someone mentioned in the comments, "Why does evil have to be so awesome?".

Anyway, it made me think about the myriad of sci-fi books and movies over the years based on the premise of computers achieving "greater than human" intelligence, then rising up and over-throwing humans. Most of the ones I can think of assume that the evil genius computer would be born in some giant corporate conglomerate, or out of government military research, or some such. What’s disturbing is I find it much easier to believe that it could instead come out of some "son of storm"-style botnet. Especially when you read that whoever controls the Storm botnet has up to 50 million computers doing their bidding. Ask Estonia’s Defence Minister what he thinks.

Skynet anyone?