Playstation Network's been down a while...

[A Black Falcon]

I don't know what a 4chan is.

Anyway, most of those bot nets are only in the thousands. Anything as concerted as millions is probably the work of a concerted professional (read: not basement hacker) effort. One thing's for sure, no DDOS attack is ever going to take down a distributed computing giant in the cloud like Google. Sony's network isn't that big, but the recent DDOS attacks haven't taken it down for more than a couple hours at a time. This really doesn't seem like that, and I don't think any government agency or criminal organization (the only ones that'd have MILLIONS of sleeper computers at their disposal) is going to have it in for Sony.

Sony's official announcement is they are taking down their systems for upgrades against the recent attacks. A little late to say that though...

ABF, you're a little confused. Every single thing you ever view, every single page, every single "stream", is a download. "Viewing a page" can trigger a download through an exploit, I think that's what you mean, and while it's possible, today's browsers are more secure than ever against that sort of thing. The majority of virus infections are the result of outdated software, such as people running Windows 98 and using Internet Explorer 5. In other words, I bet a lot of these bot nets are to be found in retirement homes.

You significantly underestimate how easy it is these days to infect a computer, or how many computers are infected with these things.

And no, infecting computers these days doesn't require crude methods like getting people to actually download, or even click on, anything. You can easily infect a computer through things like infected Javascript -- you don't click on anything of actually download any files, it just infects you when you view the page, or ad.

But yeah, you think it's only thousands, DJ? No, botnets number in the millions. And add to that the number of computers infected with lesser viruses/rootkits/etc. that "only" are there to inject spam ads, fake antivirus programs, and search redirect, I imagine that number is higher. Much higher.

Again.. Your not as safe as you think...

Indeed. I've gotten a computer infection or two within the past year (major pains to get rid of! And yes, I had a virus scanner running, and a firewall too I think. Didn't help.), and never from downloading anything... I think infected ads were the culprit, which is why now I'm using Adblock. I don't want to use it, I have no problem with ads when they're safe (websites have to make money somehow), but after two infections almost certainly due from infected ads in under a year, I have to block them.