You have to hate it when someone pulls off a huge techno-judo move and uses your own security against you.

Well that is what could happen in China according to security researchers. It would seem that there are large holes in the censorship software they want to shovel onto every computer down there.

This would make it open to being used as a large botnet. The new software called "Green Dam" is so open that any malformed website can exploit it.

Nothing like having the largest internet presence in the world running as a single bot-net. Spam anyone?

Read more here.

" "Once Green Dam is installed, any website the user visits can exploit these problems to take control of the computer," wrote the university's researchers. "This could allow malicious sites to steal private data, send spam, or enlist the computer in a botnet." The warning came in a paper published Thursday by researchers Scott Wolchok, Randy Yao, and J. Alex Halderman.

The Green Dam software filters content by blocking URLs and Web site images and by monitoring text in other applications. The filtering blacklists include both political and adult content.

The researchers said that after only one day of testing Green Dam, they discovered programming errors in the code used to process Web site requests. These would result in buffer overrun conditions on all computers running the software, they said.