Attack of the zombie computers is a growing threat

The New York Times has an interesting story today on botnets, armies of infected PCs that are used to send spam and launch denial of service attacks. It quotes a recent report that found that one botnet consisting of 793 computers had gathered 54,926 log-in credentials and 281 credit-card numbers. The stolen information affected 1,239 companies, including 35 stock brokerages, 86 bank accounts, 174 e-commerce accounts and 245 e-mail accounts.

You can read my review of a collection of essays on legal and economic mechanisms to tackle these and other computer security problems that appears in this month's Law Quarterly Review.