To the perhaps clichéd title of this months column, we can add bots, root kits, spyware and other assorted beasties that now crawl the internet. Todays malware is, arguably, the number one threat on networks of all shapes, sizes and persuasions. It used to be that we talked about malware and blended threats as if they were things separate from each other. Today, there are nearly no distinctions between the two. The malware has become the blended threat.