The suspect made about $60,000 by installing adware on some 400,000 compromised computers, according to the U.S. Attorney’s office. Among the systems affected by the botnets were computers at the Weapons Division of the United States Naval Air Warfare Center, as well as machines operated by the U.S. Department of Defense. Read the entire article Here.

Think your computer is secure? If the U.S. Department of Defense can have their computers compromised, what’s keeping yours from being infected with malware, adware, trojans or a zombie to someone’s botnet? Do you know how to protect your computer and if you do have protection, do you know how well it’s working?Are you using Windows XP’s firewall? Wanta see how well it’s protecting you?

Note: It’s just as important that your firewall does not allow anything to access the Internet from within is walls without your permission as it is to deny access from outside its walls. Test you computers firewall Here, but be sure to read the information on the page before doing a test. Steve Gibson is a well know and respected security expert. I trust his testing software without question and have used it for several years now and have recommended it to many that needed to understand how vulnerable their computers actually were and why their computers weren’t functioning as they should.

You can test how secure you computer is with Gibson’s Shields Up! online test. Be sure to explore the information before doing the test so that you understand the results as fully as possible.

You can also read Gibson’s report on a DOS (denial of service) attack and what he did to combat his attacker Here. I read it in late 2001 and up until then I didn’t have a clue about how secure my computer was, nor did I care. I was of the mind that there wasn’t anything on my computer that anyone would want. What I wasn’t aware of was what someone could do to someone else through my computer. I became much more concerned after ready Gibson’s report, which is very well written for such a dry techie kind of thing. How he resolved the problem is commendable, which goes well beyond his knowledge of technology and how to manipulate it. Read it, you won’t be sorry, even if you have absolutely no tech skills. I sure didn’t at the time I read it. I’ve gain considerable skills since then, though not nearly enough to be anything more than a want-a-be computer geek.

Gibson has uncovered many of Microsoft’s security flaws in the past. I wonder if Microsoft is going to make their next big product release a bit more secure out of the box?

Earlier this year, Microsoft intentionally infected a computer with an Internet worm which resulted in it being made part of a botnet. The operation then quarantined the machine and monitored it over a period of 20 days. During this time the zombie was contacted 5 million times by spammers. Read the entire article, Microsoft Takes On Spamming Botnets.

One can dream, can’t they?