Source: ZDNet Government Doug Hanchard:
It starts out as banter on Internet Relay Chat (IRC); on one end, a teenager programs a small
program called a botnet, and instructs it to begin pinging your IRC client with lots of packets.
You find a little botnet script yourself and retaliate. The war begins, albeit 1 versus 1. In
military terms, that’s how wars start. While individual users laugh and watch how they kept
you off an IRC channel and poof! — you’re eliminated — from a computer screen. That was
over 15 years ago. Today it’s no longer 1 PC versus 1 PC or 100 v. 100. Now it scales into the
millions with command and control from a BlackBerry. This time, somebody is going to get
hurt.