In Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace the Trade Federation used tall, thin, skeleton-like battle droids in many large-scale attacks. These battle droids blindly carried out commands sent to them from centralized control ships. The droids were unthinking and would follow any orders given to them.

It seems like something you would only see in a science-fiction movie, but just like battle droids, there are armies of zombie computers all around the world being centrally controlled to wage wars. These “botnets”, as they are called, are used for varying types of criminal activity like attacking other computers and sending spam. There are some botnet armies that number in the millions, but most are in the tens of thousands. When the Wikileaks website was recently attacked, it was by some of these botnets. And when Paypal stopped allowing donations to Wikileaks through their website, botnets attacked and took down credit card websites in retaliation. Continue reading “Cyber Wars” →