The Security Mentor

Viruses and worms these days like to enslave your machine to whoever created the virus or worm. Widespread infections can give a bad guy control over many thousands of machines.

There are so many enslaved home computers today that the bad guys have organized entire black markets in control of infected machines. Spammers can rent wholesale blocks of machines to send out their scams. The prices even depend on how quickly the infected computers can send email.

Read more at an online paper called "The Register".