Erris's Journal: USA Today Reports Botnet Menace as 40% of Net.

The botnet menace is getting mainstream attention from USA Today:

Largely unnoticed by the public, botnets have come to inundate the Internet. On a typical day, 40% of the 800 million computers connected to the Internet are bots engaged in distributing e-mail spam, stealing sensitive data typed at banking and shopping websites, bombarding websites as part of extortionist denial-of-service attacks, and spreading fresh infections, says Rick Wesson, CEO of Support Intelligence.

This general alarm without identifying the central culprit is not good enough for some people:

The mainstream media consistently use the term "computers" when they make forays into this realm. Yes, they are computers, but they're not just any computer -- they are all running Windows. All of them. Let's not mince words here: Botnets are comprised of compromised Windows systems. Thus, Microsoft's massive security failures are at the very core of the spam problem.

I agree. Unless people know the root cause, they can't take effective action and solve the problem.