Involuntary Grid Computing

It dawned on me how much alike botnets and grid computing really are.

• Botnet operators control hundreds of thousands heterogeneous machines.
• These machines have unpredictable uptimes. On this scale, there is always a sufficiently large pool of available machines.
• The diversity of systems requires a middleware layer that is portable and 'works everywhere'.
• The load on the machines should be kept 'under the radar' of the owner, otherwise the owner will become suspicious and reinstall the box.
• The botnet operators rent out their powers to various applications, such as DDOS attacks, spamming, scamming and hosting dubious content.
• A bot is deployed to a potentially hostile environment. The more advanced nets use PKI techniques, such as SSL and X509 certificates to protect their transfers, and to secure their control channel. This way they prevent being fingerprinted and counter-attacked.

I think botnets have matured enough to be called something else. Hence I coin the term 'involuntary grid computing'.