How you may have inadvertently participated in recent DDoS attacks

Even if your PC exhibits no symptoms of an infection, it may be hosting a virus poised to attack.

(Credit: Screenshot by Dennis O'Reilly/CNET)

The risk that an Internet-connected computer is infected with malware will never be reducible to zero. It's just the nature of software that errors happen. Where there are software-design errors, there are people who will exploit those errors to their advantage.

The best PC users can hope for is to minimize the chances of an infection and to mitigate the damage a piece of malware can inflict -- whether it intends to steal a user's sensitive data or to commandeer the machine as part of a cyber attack on servers thousands of miles away.

Last week, Internet users were caught in the crossfire of an online battle. On one side were spammers and other nefarious types who send malware via e-mail. On the other was the spam-fighting organization Spamhaus. As Don Reisinger reported last Wednesday, several European sites experienced significant slow-downs as a result of the attack, which may have also involved criminal gangs in Russia and Eastern Europe.

In a post last Friday, Declan McCullagh explained that the technology to d... [Read more]