Most of my waking hours on Monday were spent fielding indignant queries from sources in the anti-virus industry who were wondering what I knew about reports of a new family of malicious software that allegedly had managed to infect more than 400,000 computers worldwide seemingly overnight with computer code that hijacked each machine for use in blasting out spam e-mails. What I discovered says as much about the steady-as-she-goes state of the anti-virus industry as it does the lengths to which an upstart security company will go to upset the apple cart that defines the mainstream computer security marketplace today. At issue was news that Atlanta-based security firm Damballa’s had discovered that hackers had infected more than 400,000 Windows PCs with malicious software that forces them to relay junk e-mail. The story noted that this particular contagion had heretofore gone undetected by 80 percent of the commercial anti-virus tools on