Another potential use for the Storm worm... I can't imagine this would be why it's being assembled since there's no money in it, but consider the prospect of x million machines cycling from idle to full load once a minute. If the power swing in doing this is (for example) 100 watts per PC then even at 1M machines that's switching a 100 megawatt load in and out of circuit, which could cause some fun in power distribution systems. You could easily double (or more) this load by putting the PC and monitor to sleep and then running it up to full load and back down again.
Obviously it's highly unlikely that that's what the Storm botherders are planning to do with it, apart from the lack of financial motive you'd need to carefully synchronise the timing, and the PCs would be distributed all over the world rather than affecting one grid. Probably the most you'd get is localised problems, overloading, maybe a few fires from wiring. OTOH the shock effect of someone being able to do this worldwide would be something to behold. Talk about a "light blue touch paper and stand clear". (If they *do* do this with Storm, remember that you read it here first :-). A much simpler attack if all you want to do is cause panic would be to just brick the machines and watch the fun when 1M+ RMAs hit the service channels. Peter. --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]