IN JUNE, the websites of Google, Yahoo and Microsoft disappeared for hours when their servers were swamped with hundreds of thousands of simultaneous webpage requests that they couldn’t possibly service. It sounds a tough attack to orchestrate, but executing it couldn’t have been simpler.
A hacker kicked off the assault by typing a simple command into an internet chat room. That command awakened dormant software “bots” that had been planted in tens of thousands of PCs around the world with the help of computer viruses. When the bots read the command in an internet chat room they were monitoring, they…
