PC Hijack

Cyber criminals now control millions of personal computers and pose a serious threat to the Internet's future, experts say. Up to a quarter of all computers on the net could be used by cyber criminals in so-called "botnets". Technology writer John Markoff said: "It's as bad as you can imagine. It puts the whole Internet at risk."

The panel of leading experts was discussing the future of the Internet at the World Economic Forum in Davos. Botnets are made up of large numbers of computers that malicious hackers have brought under their control after infecting them with socalled Trojan virus programs.
Of the 600 million computers currently on the internet, between 100 and 150 million were already part of these botnets, said Vint Cerf, one of the fathers of the Internet.

While most owners are oblivious to the infection, they are used to launch spam email campaigns, denial-of-service attacks or online fraud schemes. Markoff said a single botnet at one point used about 15 per cent of Yahoo's search capacity. It used retrieved random text snippets to camouflage messages so its spam email could get past spam filters.

The expert panel, among them Dell founder Michael Dell, agreed a solution had to be found, but its members were unsure about solutions. It was still too easy for net criminals to hide their tracks, several panel members said.