Examples abound of this type of infection, from Ghost Net, to attacks on the Pentagon, Google, RSA, and the McAfee Night Dragon incident.

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Once again, Reid had slipped the net, carrying out an estimated 20 further attacks until his eventual arrest in February 2008.

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Russian hackers, meanwhile, took to the Net, launching waves of distributed denial-of-service attacks against the country's government, banking and media Web sites, using thousands of personal computers hijacked with hidden software to overload the servers.

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