As a part of his work for the Honeynet Research Alliance, Bill McCarty, an associate professor of Web and information technology at Azusa Pacific University in Southern California, deployed a series of vulnerable Windows based systems on the Internet. These "honeypots" were compromised by Internet worms and malicious hackers over and over, and led McCarty on a whirlwind tour through a series of sophisticated DDoS networks, one after the other.

"You put up a honeypot and it gets knocked over... again and again and again," he told ZDNet Australia.

Once his honeypot had been compromised, it joined what’s called a botnet, or bot network. These networks are used by malicious hackers to conduct denial of service attacks by issuing single commands to huge numbers of systems through internet relay chat commands.

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