A controversial BBC Click documentary which involved researchers obtaining access to a botnet and sending spam is due to screen this weekend despite a growing storm of criticism.

BBC Click obtained access to a botnet of 22,000 compromised Windows PCs from an underground forum. It then used these machines to send junk mail to two accounts it had itself established with Gmail and Hotmail. The programme also used these compromised PCs to show how they might be used in a denial of service attack. After obtaining permission from security firm PrevX, it launched an assault that rendered a backup test site established by the firm unreachable.

One strange thing is that the researchers warned the owners of the malware-infected PCs that their machines had been infected by changing their wallpaper to display a message from BBC Click explaining how to clean up their machines. How sweet!

Security experts have slammed the experiment but then I thought whether this should not be standard practice for ISPs. Would clean up a lot of machines this way. perhaps the security experts were peeved as it showed how useless their services are to many computer users.