Windows 7: Zombie tactics threaten to poison honeypots.

Innovations in botnet technology threaten the usefulness of honeypots, one of the main ways to study how bot herders control networks of zombie PCs.

Computer scientists led by Cliff Zou and colleagues at the University of Central Florida warn that bot herders can now avoid honeypots - unprotected computers outfitted with monitoring software - set up by security firms.

Ethical concerns mean that security firms do not allow their infrastructure to be used in sending spam or running attacks against victims. By monitoring such instructions it's therefore possible for cybercrooks to program command and control servers to disable or simply ignore these machines, thus depriving security firms of vital intelligence in how zombie botnets are operating in the real world.