How Computers Hijacked Facebook's I.P.O.
Even here, computers hijack my attention and interfere with my job.
In Estonia's case, "botnets" (swarms of computers hijacked by surreptitiously placed code, usually spread by spam) swamped sites by deluging them with bogus requests for information.
More than a thousand unsuspecting Internet users around the world have recently had their computers hijacked by hackers, who computer security experts say are using them for pornographic Web sites.
A1 BUSINESS DAY C1-10, 12 Computer Hackers' Scheme More than a thousand Internet users around the world have recently had their computers hijacked by hackers, who are using them to display pornographic Web sites while avoiding detection by Internet service providers seeking to shut them down.
Russian hackers, meanwhile, took to the Net, launching waves of distributed denial-of-service attacks against the country's government, banking and media Web sites, using thousands of personal computers hijacked with hidden software to overload the servers.
Over the past week, researchers at Finnish security company F-secure have identified what they say is the first use of Storm's massive "botnet"–a collection of hundreds of thousands of computers hijacked with hidden software to steal users' banking information.
Leighton, the 53-year-old chief scientist at Akamai, describes how the screen lights up when a botnet a colony of thousands of unwitting computers hijacked with malicious software launches a mass attack from China on a U.S. target: The teeming lines streak across the Atlantic like an intercontinental ballistic missile attack.
Beyond this reported use of OLYMPIA, however, CSEC's automation of computer-hijacking is fairly mysterious; though it wouldn't be a stretch to imagine that it has significantly expanded CSEC's spy network.
We should also hold the Administration accountable if government computers are hijacked by criminals to launch denial-of-service attacks.
Google's Matt Cutts offers more details about the virus on his Twitter account, apparently it only affects Windows computers and hijacks Google results.
