When members of a private usenet I used to frequent caught wind of this IRC controlled army of bots, many users didn't understand that they didn't have to ever go to IRC to become an IRC bot drone. They had to have it explained to them that they became infected in the traditional ways, using unsafe email/usenet clients (this usenet allowed HTML posting), using warez, using UNsafe browsers to surf (IE), spyware (from 'freeware' and UNsafe browsers [IE}), ect. Then the infection would call out to the IRC channel the evil ones programmed into the infection. Then all the evil one had to do was enter in commands through the IRC channel; those commands would be picked up by the infected dronebots. That NYT article mentioned something about the FBI seemed to want to know more about monitoring IRC. Well DUH, they were in contact with GRC at the time he was DDOS'd by IRC dronebots (GRC was calling WinXP unsecure due to its raw sockets, mentioned how easily a script kiddie would be able to take advantage of the raw sockets, so a script kiddie DDOS'd him). It's not like the FBI doesn't already know GRC; he's the one that alerted them to how dangerous the WinXP raw sockets were...he also alerted MS, who ignored him (big surprise). That's when the FBI had to make the public announcement to *force* MS to fix XP.