Initiatives such as the OLPC and Classmate could mean an explosion in botnets in the developing world, warn security expertsWhat if the plans to spread low-cost One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) and Intel Classmate computers to the developing world work? What if in a few years there are hundreds of millions of them out there? Many might applaud. But among computer security experts, there’s growing concern that those scheme could inadvertently lead to a huge increase in computer crime.Initiatives such as the OLPC and the Classmate are intended to help bridge the digital divide. But security experts warn that there could be an unforeseen negative effect.”There is the possibility of creating the largest botnet in the world,” says Yuval Ben-Ithak of Finjan, a computer security company. This view is borne out by a recent report by F-Secure identifying Africa as one of the emerging cybercrime threats.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/feb/07/olpc.security