Last week, Kentucky Fried Chicken stores around the nation struggled to accommodate a surge of roughly 4 million new customers, after Oprah Winfrey told viewers of her show that they could get a free meal at KFC by printing out an Internet coupon. By most accounts, the marketing gimmick was a disaster, but it got me thinking about Oprah’s sheer ability to mobilize the masses. I wondered: How much badness on the Internet would disappear overnight if Oprah suggested that her devotees download, install and run a set of free PC security scanning tools? Probably quite a bit, or at least enough to register a notable drop in global spam volumes, malicious software attacks and other activity that depends largely on remotely compromised PCs or “bots” to do most of the grunt work. Estimates of just how many systems are infected by bot programs vary widely, but even by the