This Trojan is a tiny, easy to hide program poised to launch DOS attacks to an intended target. Now imagine thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands of these Trojans infecting networked machines with a Web front end, then waiting. These masses of data rocket through a string of ISPs and onto the target where they overwhelm the routers, clog the pipes, and render the servers useless. The Slave's Role Let's start with the first link, the slave that haplessly launches the attack. Most of them have been located in universities with high speed Internet connections.
Universities are notoriously the least-protected network systems on the planet.
Even before Kevin Mitnick started infiltrating England's Leeds University VAX machines back in the late 80's, university machines had long been used as launch points for hack attacks. The bad news is it's open. And then there's wide open - as in no firewalls, no intrusion detection, and no security policy. Suffice it to say, .edu's make dangerous Internet neighbors. If Janet Reno gets her way, best security practices may someday become compulsory to doing business on the Internet.