Comment

Anonymous and the Inevitable Fall of the Nation-State

11
Charles12/10/2010 11:52:40 am PST

re: #9 Barrett Brown

Well, again — I believe you when you say Housh and associates are using a voluntary botnet. (Still a botnet, by strict definition, since it’s an organized network of computers acting in concert.)

But even with thousands of people running coordinated scripts, I’m not convinced you could seriously affect one of the highly distributed systems run by companies like Visa and PayPal using that kind of network alone. You can be annoying, and get their attention, but criminal botnets that can do real damage usually consist of many more networked zombie computers — hundreds of thousands.

So far, it looks like for all the publicity, the real damage from these attacks has been very minimal.