At one point, Jeanson James Ancheta, a 21-year-old California hacker, had more than 400,000 compromised computers at his command. He and his “botmaster underground” cohorts would sell access to their “botnet” to third parties, which would use it to launch massive distributed denial-of-service attacks, disseminate a torrent of spam and install adware on unsuspecting users’ machines. Earlier this month, Ancheta became the first person successfully prosecuted for building and using a botnet for malicious purposes. While the G-men got their man, there are thousands of other Anchetas on the Internet, each using innovative attack tools, techniques and technologies to compromise networks and steal their way to more bandwidth, information and money. Fortunately, security VARs have a wide range of innovative technologies to protect their customers’ IT infrastructures.