I said:
It's probably a stealth searchbot from a communist country's military intelligence apparatus, looking for vulnerabilities and sensitive information of any kind. Such information could be used for a wide range of criminal or terrorist activities.
Then you said:
I think your tinfoil hat is a little tight this morning.
And now I reply:
Well, you might think my scenario is outlandish, and the stuff of conspiricy theories, but
this link (washington post) is about a graduate student who, using standard network query tools, mapped a large amount of corporate lan/wan and larger structures on the internet to the degree where US authorities want his thesis kept under wraps since it could be used by terrorists. So? Is my hypothesis really that outlandish? Don't answer, because the answer is evidently "no", and other people in high places seem to think so as well. I don't doubt for a microsecond that all sorts of nefarious groups including criminals, terrorists, and military agencies of foriegn governments are examining every nook and cranny of the net to understand its underlying structure and possible vulnerabilities. So instead of reaching for the increasingly tired tin-foil hat saw, and attempting to discredit the messenger, you might try thinking outside the box instead.
SpaceBar,
Protecting against that kind of miscreant is what I do for a living. The WaPo article is interesting (though definately very overblown!) but has nothing to do with the supposed 55808 "third generation trojan" which based on the technical description of the way the packets are built can not be many of the things that people who are non-technical in the areas of how the TCP/IP communication protocol to the byte field level works, how worms propagate, routing protocols, etc have speculated simply can not be true.
I suggest you read from the latest Crypto-Gram newsletter by Bruce Schneier, noted cryptographer and inventor of the Blowfish and Twofish algorithms and foremost minds in the area of information security, the selection "The Risk Of Cyber-Terrorism" from his latest Cryptogram newsletter:
http://www.counterpane.com/crypto-gram-0306.html It might make you feel a little better. I can tell you from first hand career gained experience, he is 100% correct.