I have been an AustCERT presentation recently. They talked about something called botnet. A botnet is a network of compromised or infected PCs. It has a sophisticated Command & Control.
While reading about cyberattack on Georgia story on Google news, it prompted me to learn more about botnet.
I decided to click on these links returned from Google:
http://www.honeynet.org/papers/bots/
http://www.securityfocus.com/columnists/398/1
http://www.secureworks.com/research/threats/topbotnets/
A compromised computer is sold in the botnet world as little as 4 US cents.
Each botnet has its nick name such as RUSTOCK which sends pharmaceutical spams which are designed to infect more computers to join their botnets.