First off, welcome to my new site.

Notice the new in that first sentence. As of yesterday, my site reached its tenth day of existence. And had its first vulnerability scan. Currently, my site has yet to show up as a Google search result, but yesterday I found a hit on my log file which turned out to be a vulnerability scanner, called “Morfeus f**king Scanner” (not at all suspicious is it?).

My point here is that being on the Internet is inherently risky. This scan came from Virginia, and given what I know about automated scans, I would suspect that it came from a computer infected with some virus or another.

Distributed computing grew over the past decade, leading to programs such as Folding at Home, programs to help the sciences, and to help medicine. Unfortunately, it also lead to the rise of the botnets, the networks responsible for most of the spam emails in the world, and responsible for DDOS attacks. These botnets are created by using a virus which connects the computers and uses their computing power without the knowledge of the owners, who often have neglected to maintain their security, either not installing an antivirus, letting their subscription lapse or choosing an antivirus which does not provide full protection.

Everybody hates spam - keep your computer secure.