"Attack of the Zombie Computers Is Growing Threat"

John Markoff reports in today's New York Times about the increasing scale of botnet-based operations to send spam and gather and use individuals' financial information. The article quotes David Farber:

“It represents a threat but it’s one that is hard to explain,” said David J. Farber, a Carnegie Mellon computer scientist who was an Internet pioneer. “It’s an insidious threat, and what worries me is that the scope of the problem is still not clear to most people.”