How much power do the bad guys have?

Haven’t you ever wondered what the criminals do with all the virus infected PC’s. what we know for sure is they are used for, sending spam, performing dDoS attacks, and other misc evil activities.

As every is aware (I hope) , the StormWorm has been making it’s rounds over the internet the past few months and adding to its botnet a tremendous amount of PC’s. Today Peter Gutmann posted to the Full-Disclosure mailing list a quick summary of the estimated power of this botnet.

This doesn’t seem to have received much attention, but the world’s most powerful supercomputer entered operation recently. Comprising between 1 and 10 million CPUs (depending on whose estimates you believe), the Storm botnet easily outperforms the currently top-ranked system, BlueGene/L, with a mere 128K CPU cores. Using the figures from Valve’s online survey, http://www.steampowered.com/status/survey.html, for which the typical machine has a 2.3 – 3.3 GHz single core CPU with about 1GB of RAM, the Storm cluster has the equivalent of 1-10M (approximately) 2.8 GHz P4s with 1-10 petabytes of RAM (BlueGene/L has a paltry 32 terabytes). In fact this composite system has better hardware resources than what’s listed at http://www.top500.org for the entire world’s top 10 supercomputers:

BlueGene/L: 128K CPUs, 32TB
Jaguar: 22K CPUs, 46TB
Red Storm: 26K CPUs, 40TB
BGW: 40K CPUs, 10TB
New York Blue: 37K CPUs, 18TB
ASC Purple: 12K CPUs, 49TB
eServer Blue Gene: ?
Abe: 10K CPUs, 10TB
MareNostrum: 10K CPUs, 20GB
HLRB-II: 10K CPUs, 39GB

This may be the first time that a top 10 supercomputer has been controlled not by a government or megacorporation but by criminals. The question remains, now that they have the world’s most powerful supercomputer system at their disposal, what are they going to do with it?

Here is another good source of information on botnets.