The Shadowserver Foundation, a group of security professionals that track the number of Trojan infected computers, has reported a threefold increase in the last three months. Roughly 100,000 machines were part of a botnet during June 2008, which increased to 450,000 by the end of August 2008!

Sadly these hijacked computers are then often abused by hackers to spew out masses of commercial spam (junk email) or as platforms to attack and take down servers by overloading them with masses of data requests (Distributed Denial of Service - DDoS - attack).

Typically consumers can protect themselves by installing strong anti-virus software and firewalls, while also using some common sense when opening unknown files or email attachments.