November 8th, 2006 by James Omdahl
Catchy headline, eh?
I was checking out the Search Engine Watch forums and ran across a link to a really good Wired Magazine article called “Attack of the Bots.” The article talks about “botnets” that are used for distributed denial-of-service attacks, and the potential that botnets will bring the Internet to its knees (does the Internet have knees?)
Interesting stuff. If you have a few minutes, give it a read.
The article just barely touches on the subject of distributed denial-of-service attacks being used against PPC companies - but I would be interested to know if the botnetters would be able to successfully take down Google or Yahoo’s PPC operations (the article says yes).
Actually, what am I saying…Yahoo is good enough at taking down their own PPC operations. No need for botnetters to waste their time on that. 
I do want to say that Wired seems to enjoy posting alarmist articles, which is why I don’t read it regularly. A great example was their Spam + Blogs = Trouble article from a couple of months ago, which proclaimed that spam blogs would destroy the blogoshpere, the search engines, and maybe let the air out of your car’s tires when you weren’t looking. I guess my point is to take the article with a grain of salt.
Have a good Wednesday!
November 8th, 2006 at 3:28 pm
Over in the email spam world, things are definitely getting much worse lately. Our customers (who include some major US-based corporations) have seen an uptick in traffic of between 30 and 120% since September 1 — and all of this is botnet-originated traffic.
I think the spammers have evolved. Its a shame to see that theyve evolved their comment spam tactics as well.
November 8th, 2006 at 3:51 pm
Thanks for the comment Ken - good insight.
I have noticed that I am getting a ridiculous amount of spam lately. I was out of the office for three days and I ended up with around 800 spam emails. Its not just annoying but time consuming. There has got to be a ton of worker productivity lost just from sifting through spam email.
It sounds like your company is working on a solution for problems like mine. Sounds like you are in a great market for the long-haul.
November 8th, 2006 at 8:55 pm
If you read your email with Outlook, beware of the stock image spams. Theyve figured out a way to insert an image in the email and outlook wont block it. Then when you open up your email it sends a ping back to the spammer and they know you read your email! Then you end up getting more spam, and its an endless cycle
November 8th, 2006 at 8:57 pm
If you read your email with Outlook, beware of the stock image spams. Theyve figured out a way to insert an image in the email and outlook wont block it. Then when you open up your email it sends a ping back to the spammer and they know you read your email! Then you end up getting more spam, and its an endless cycle
November 9th, 2006 at 12:54 pm
that is some interesting stuff, Jman. thanks. Also, shouldnt be bottinators? ha.