Storm Botnet

Just wanted to get a quick response from you guys to hear what you think about botnet's and how they relate to social networks. I know that they aren't consisted of connecting actual people, but they do have the power to harness many people's computers, turning them into a unique network of attacking power. To me, this is kind of the negative side of networking as we see it today, and it always gives me pause about connecting myself into any type of network, as being a part of a network increases your vulnerability.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storm_botnet

The Storm botnet can be thought of as a social network, but only because of how it was created. And even then, it is not very similar to the social networks that we have discussed in class. It is presumed that most of the spam emails sent out were sent to a list of email addresses obtained illicitly. However, some of the spam emails would have been sent to users because their email address was in the contact book of a person who became infected. In the first case, a social network in the sense that we have discussed in class is not created; rather, a single node is connected to thousands of other nodes, but none of the nodes are connected to each other. In the second case however, we see an (evil) example of the social networks we've discussed in class; a network consisting of nodes that connect to each other. Also, in the second case, we could represent the infection of each computer through our algorithm n=2^(d+1)-1 where n is the number of infected machines and d is the number of days passed (if one set of emails is sent per day) and assuming that each person who becomes infected sends emails to enough of their contacts to get 2 unsuspecting users to get themselves infected.

As I said at the beginning of this post, I think the Storm botnet could only really be considered a social network if it was created predominantly by the second method mentioned, through spamming infected users' contacts.