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Las Zetas kill another "blogger." A body was hung from the same overpass where two bloggers were murdered last month. According to the Houston Chronicle, a sign hung with his body said, in Spanish, "This happened to me for not understanding that I shouldn't report on the social networks."

Representatives of the Nuevo Laredo En Vivo forum denied the person was one of their moderators. One of the previous victims was a moderator there.

Our article earlier this week about the frequency of DNS exploits has already come back in the news, in the wake of shutting down one of the the longest running and most costly botnets in history by the FBI earlier this week. The network, called Esthost, supposedly claimed an estimated four to five million victims and fleeced them somewhere around $14 million. All of that was due to 100 rogue DNS servers that were used to redirect massive amounts of traffic from the infected computers. The operation, dubbed Ghost Click by the FBI, raided two data centers in New York and Chicago, along with arresting people in Tartu, Estonia.

Every time a botnet is taken down, another is waiting in the wings to take its place. Each successive iteration of malware infected networked computers is more sophisticated than the last. Security research company Kaspersky believes it has found one that is almost indestructible.

The TDL-4 botnet is 4.5 million PCs strong. It has some unique features that make it difficult to remove such as a powerful rootlet exploitation and the ability to disable other malware that is installed on a computer. Those features make it difficult to detect and remove the malware, but that is not what makes the botnet indestructible. The way TDL-4 communicates with its command-and-control center and other infected computers is what makes it unique.

The biggest cloud network in the world is owned by the mob.

While you may think that Google, Amazon and Microsoft are the world's largest cloud providers it's really the Conficker worm that has helped criminal networks spawn a botnet of mass proportions.

Google has confirmed news today that bot herders used Google App Engine to feed commands to networks of infected computers. According to Arbor Networks, the bot herd was discovered over the weekend. After being notified of the attack, Google quickly shut down the infected app engine.

Also on Monday, the Koobface botnet was attacking Google Reader to send malicious links through Twitter, Facebook and other social networks.

The breach is another sign that black hatters are taking a much keener interest in the cloud infrastructure for making attacks. And even Google is at risk.

Being part of a botnet is no fun. Your computer becomes your worst enemy, watching everything you do, collecting all of your secrets, and then delivering all that data to the bot-herder; the person who originated the network. But what does it really mean to be part of a botnet, and is there anything that can you do about it?

According to a report today from The Associated Press, Internet security company Prevx recently discovered a Web site that was being used as a storage facility for data stolen from 160K infected computers, and the discovery offers an interesting case study.