BBC reports Criminals 'may overwhelm the web';
Mr Cerf, who is one of the co-developers of the TCP/IP standard that underlies all internet traffic and now works for Google, likened the spread of botnets to a "pandemic".
Of the 600 million computers currently on the internet, between 100 and 150 million were already part of these botnets, Mr Cerf said.
Botnets are made up of large numbers of computers that malicious hackers have brought under their control after infecting them with so-called Trojan virus programs.
While most owners are oblivious to the infection, the networks of tens of thousands of computers are used to launch spam e-mail campaigns, denial-of-service attacks or online fraud schemes
Mr Markoff, who writes for the New York Times, said that a single botnet at one point used up about 15% of Yahoo's search capacity.
It used retrieved random text snippets to camouflage messages so that its spam e-mail could get past spam filters.
"Despite all that, the net is still working, which is amazing. It's pretty resilient," said Mr Cerf.
The expert panel, among them Michael Dell, founder of Dell computers, and Hamadoun Toure, secretary general of the International Telecommunication Union, agreed that a solution had to be found to ensure the survival of the web.
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