In early June, I was in a nice rainy East Coast US city for meetings dealing with particularly thorny issues related to ways the Internet experience is being killed off for regular folks—and for institutions (NGOs) that are promoting free speech and human rights. Over a small breakfast, I sketched in my book some notes about the progression of malware over time. Basically paralleling the development I describe in my site The Social Graph of Malware, malware has gone from simple and juvenile defacement of web sites to become sophisticated and bandwidth-hogging socially-engineered schemes designed to get people to fall for a purchase they didn’t want to make,  or just to click a link to enroll their computer in a network of zombies poised to conduct nasty attacks on other people. [Read more…]