The World Economic Forum takes place this week in Davos, Switzerland, and leaders around the world gather to discuss issues like the Iraq war, global climate change, and globalization—along with the incredible prevalence of botnets.

The BBC's Tim Weber, who was in the audience of an Internet panel featuring Vint Cerf, Michael Dell, John Markoff of the New York Times, and Jon Zittrain of Oxford, came away most impressed by the botnet statistics. Cerf told his listeners that approximately 600 million computers are connected to the Internet, and that 150 million of them might be participants in a botnet—nearly all of them unwilling victims. Weber remarks that "in most cases the owners of these computers have not the slightest idea what their little beige friend in the study is up to."

If Cerf's estimate is accurate, that's one quarter of all machines connected to the Internet. So is the Internet doomed? Well, you're reading this, so no, not yet. But the botnet menace is no phantom, and it has been growing in strength for years. In September 2006, security research firm Arbor Networks announced that it was now seeing botnet-based denial of service attacks capable of generating an astonishing 10-20Gbps of junk data. The company notes that when major attacks of this sort began, ISPs often do exactly what the attacker wants them to do: take the target site offline.

What is it that keeps the "botherders" so fascinated with amassing large flocks like modern-day, digital shepherds? Money. Once millions of "little beige friends" have been compromised with bot software, the creators can then use or rent the network to deliver spam, denial of service attacks, and log passwords and usernames.

All of these uses can be lucrative if you know the right wrong people. Several months ago, Wired published a great story about the extended botnet attack on Blue Security that captures the shadowy nature of the botnet world. Even after weeks of attacks and public tauntings from the spammer behind them, neither the security firm nor its ISPs could fully halt the attacks or identify the person who was launching them. In the end, Blue Security folded.

Botnets have been behind a significant increase in spam in recent months, and some security vendors have warned that these networks are now large enough to pose a potential threat to major government networks (at least those which operate or are connected to the public Internet).

It can be difficult to locate and prosecute botnet operators. Blue Security officials believed that their antagonist was in Russia, but American teenagers have also been involved in the practice, and several have been prosecuted. Two were sentenced last year to 57 and 37 months in jail, respectively—sentences designed to send a message that the government is serious about the issue.