Botnets first came into the consciousness of most of the general public in early 2000 when a Canadian teenager launched a series of distributed denial-of-service attacks against several high-profile Web sites.

The teen, who used the handle Mafiaboy, targeted Yahoo, ETrade, Dell, eBay, Amazon and other sites over the course of several days, flooding the sites with massive amounts of junk traffic until their servers crashed. Although Mafiaboy didn’t use a botnet to launch his attacks, security experts warned in the aftermath of the episode that botnets – large networks of PCs infected with a specific kind of malware – and the DDoS attacks they’re used for.