Criminals Want To Use Your PS3's Processing Power… And Other Tales To Keep You Up At Night

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the be-afraid,-be-very-afraid dept

There are companies out there that make their money by keeping you very, very afraid of all that new technology out there. That isn’t to say that there aren’t new security concerns from new technologies, but there seems to be a tendency to hype the risk well before it’s clear that it’s really a serious risk. There are some firms that have a long history of doing this. Meta Group was especially famous for once saying that all companies should ban all cameraphones from their offices — which seemed both extreme and shortsighted, since there are plenty of benefits to cameraphones as well. Sometime after that, Gartner bought Meta Group, and they seem to have learned how to overhype the threat of new technologies from them. First, there was the big threat of iPods in the office, and now Gartner is warning everyone that criminals want your PS3s. It’s not to steal them and resell them, but they want to access the processing power on your brand new PS3 for a new generation of botnets. Now, it’s certainly possible at some point that this will become an issue — but it seems a little early to make that claim without any real evidence that this is happening.