Japan has national botnet warriors; why don't we?

October is Cybersecurity Awareness Month here in the United States, which is a good thing, because we come down with more PC botnet infections than any other country in the world. Microsoft reports 2.2 million US PCs hijacked for cybercrime or distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks on websites in the first half of this year. And in late September, police in the greater New York area busted over 60 members of a botnet ring whose plan was to deploy the Zeus Trojan to clean out banks. Botnets "are the launch pad for much of today's criminal activity on the Internet," Microsoft security expert Adrienne Hall warned last week. "In many ways, they are the perfect base of operations for computer criminals."