The internet and the PCs attached to it are sometimes known as “generative” technologies, meaning that they allow anyone to build and share new uses for them without the approval of “gatekeepers.” Yet today, malicious code that seemed of little significance when it first appeared—such as viruses, and the spam email now known to everyone with an email account—threatens to drive people away from the internet and towards sterile, stand-alone appliances that can be manipulated only with the acquiescence of their manufacturers.
Our open technologies are now routinely subverted. One common type of “malware” compromises PCs to create “botnets”—networks of infected machines open to future instructions by the malware’s creator. Such instructions may include directing each infected PC to become its own email server, sending spam by the millions to addresses harvested from the hard disc of the machine or gleaned from internet searches, with the process typically going unnoticed by the PC’s owner. One estimate pegs the number of PCs involved in such botnets at 100 to 150m, or a quarter of all the computers on the internet as of early 2007. A study monitoring botnet activity in 2006 detected the emergence, on average, of 1m new bots per month. MessageLabs, a company that monitors spam, recently stopped counting bot-infected computers because it could not keep up. It says it quit when the figure passed about 10m. And since not all bots are active at any given time, the number of infected computers may be much higher.
Modern worms and viruses routinely infect vast swathes of internet-connected PCs. In 2004, the Sasser worm infected more than half a million computers in three days. The Sobig.f virus, which replicated through email, was released in August 2003 and within two days accounted for around 70 per cent of all email in the world. In May 2006, a virus exploiting a vulnerability in Microsoft Word propagated through the computers of the US department of state in east Asia, forcing the machines to be taken offline during critical weeks prior to North Korea’s missile tests. As these numbers show, viruses are not simply the province of computing backwaters. The war is being lost across the board.
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