Cerf: A Quarter of Net's Computers Infected
More than 150 million computers of the 600 million or so connected to the Internet are infected, potentially used by criminals to do harm via botnets. So said Vint Cerf, Google's "Chief Evangelist," at a workshop yesterday put on by the National Science Foundation and the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development. Actually, he talked about it first last week at the World Economic Summit in Davos. Surprising more people haven't picked up on the number.
Cerf wasn't really making news with this yesterday -- he was prompted during a brief speech by Harvard and Oxford's Jonathan Zittrain, who spoke about a future Internet, on which the dominant machines are non-"generative," or slightly boring, without the capacities of a PC (think: a game console or a TiVo). The title of the Workshop, in Washington, D.C., was "Social & Economic Factors Shaping the Future of the Internet," a deep and rich topic. As you might guess by this posting's lead-in, security and privacy were major topics. You can read all about it here. You can read WebWatch's position paper here.