The Storm Worm. A virus and set of malware that has been spreading across the internet since January 2007. According to this article, it is now estimated that it has turned up to 50 Million computers into bots (or Zombie Computers), and is more powerful than a supercomputer.

So, I thought, a fine time to do some number crunching, to see if we can see approximately how powerful this bot-net is. (See here for the full article, with calculations at the bottom, if you’re looking at this from the homepage.)
The bot-net will probably have a maximum of around 40,000 Terahertz (THz) at its disposal. To put that into perspective, the worlds fastest supercomputer (The Blue Gene L) has around 91.8 Terahertz.

Ok, that is a really, really impressive amount of processing power. But what use is that power without being able to get data (spam emails etc.) onto the internet?

61 GigaBytes a second.

You heard me right. The bot network, will have the estimated capacity to pump 61 Gigabytes of data onto the internet per second.

At 20KB an email, thats 3,200,000 (Three Million Two Hundred Thousand), emails per second.
Revised email calculations (see note below): at 11.73KB an email, thats 5,442,177 emails per second.

Or, at 750MB per CDROM, thats 83.3 discs per second.
I think the term “Houston, we have a problem” doesn’t even come close to showing the amount of pain these guys can cause. At that rate of data transfer, this cracker (“hacker” for mass-media) group will be able to take any website in the world off-line, with a Distributed Denial of Service attack. They may even be able to take the internet offline, with another Backbone attack.
Now, this has been a almost-worst-case scenario, but trust me when I say, this is not good. I think, something drastic may be in order.

Note: Checkout my math and assumptions by clicking the “Read More” (if you’re not already in the full post). If you see any problems, or have some more-up-to-date information, feel free to register, and add a comment. (Sorry about forcing you to register. Spammers have been causing problems ><.) Alternatively, my email address can be found on the “about” page above.”
Update: Looks like the bot-net is being brought into play to attack anti-spammer websites.
http://www.spamnation.info/blog/archives/2007/09/419eater_ddosd.html

Update #2: The webmaster of spamnation.info has confirmed (roughly) the analysis of this article, which says the average spam email is 11.76KB. As such, I have revised my email calculations. I’ll probably post a follow-up to this, if I can get any more accurate data to go on, and I may re-do all of the calculations at some point, with a more conservative bot number estimate base.