{"id":171,"date":"2007-10-05T15:58:42","date_gmt":"2007-10-05T05:58:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.malcolmgroves.com\/blog\/?p=171"},"modified":"2007-10-05T15:58:42","modified_gmt":"2007-10-05T05:58:42","slug":"storm-botnet-the-rise-of-the-machines","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.malcolmgroves.com\/blog\/?p=171","title":{"rendered":"Storm Botnet : The Rise of the Machines?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Bill Schneier has an <a href=\"http:\/\/www.schneier.com\/blog\/archives\/2007\/10\/the_storm_worm.html\">interesting write-up<\/a> about the Storm worm\/botnet\/virus\/trojan\/thingumy. I can&#8217;t help but be massively impressed with this from a purely technical perspective. As someone mentioned in the comments, &quot;Why does evil have to be so awesome?&quot;.<\/p>\n<p>Anyway, it made me think about the myriad of sci-fi books and movies over the years based on the premise of computers achieving &quot;greater than human&quot; 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&#8217;s disturbing is I find it much easier to believe that it could instead come out of some &quot;son of storm&quot;-style botnet. Especially when you read that whoever controls the Storm botnet has up to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.informationweek.com\/news\/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=201804528\">50 million computers doing their bidding<\/a>. Ask <a href=\"http:\/\/www.wired.com\/politics\/security\/magazine\/15-09\/ff_estonia\">Estonia&#8217;s Defence Minister<\/a> what he thinks.     <\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Skynet_%28fictional%29\">Skynet<\/a> anyone? <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Bill Schneier has an interesting write-up about the Storm worm\/botnet\/virus\/trojan\/thingumy. I can&#8217;t help but be massively impressed with this from a purely technical perspective. As someone mentioned in the comments, &quot;Why does evil have to be so awesome?&quot;. Anyway, it made me think about the myriad of sci-fi books and movies over the years based [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-171","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.malcolmgroves.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.malcolmgroves.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.malcolmgroves.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.malcolmgroves.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.malcolmgroves.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=171"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.malcolmgroves.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.malcolmgroves.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=171"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.malcolmgroves.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=171"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.malcolmgroves.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=171"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}