Many of us have seen this scene in so many zombie movies: a howling horde advancing on the outpost in the form of a roaring, crawling heap of plagued meat. There are too many! Back!… Gunshots, now stuttering and distant. A maddened staccato of the frantic run of the last survivor… Then, finally, silence.

Mēris (Latvian for “plague”), a modified version of the infamous Mirai botnet, brought some 250,000 “zombies” or compromised devices to the party last summer, and the assault they unleashed would have put the scene above to shame. According to the researchers, the botnet was able to send up to 21.8 million requests per second to its victims, blocking…