“William Hill did incur a DOS [denial of service] attack in early 2004, and an extortion demand for $50,000,” said a spokesman for the company. “We were and remain totally non-compliant with demands of this nature.” During the attack, William Hill’s online gaming trade dipped by 30 per cent.A spokesman for Coral confirmed that the company had also received extortion demands. Detective Chief Superintendent Mick Deats, the head of the National Hi-Tech Crime Unit (NHTCU), has an impossible task. How does he defend the UK against attacks from 11 million PCs around the world? The problem with “botnets” (as groups of these machines are known) is becoming serious. “One indication of the increase in organised crime groups’ use of botnets is that 25 per cent of our work revolves around this area of criminality, and that looks likely to increase,” Deats says.
The NHTCU is charged with the task of combating computer-based serious and organised crime.

Here’s an example of what it’s up against; several UK gambling firms were targeted by Russian criminals using botnets to bombard websites with millions of messages (packets of data) in an attempt to put them off the air. “It is disconcerting when possibly the nearest example of a Type Ia supernova is so different from all the others,” says Blair.Alexei Fillipenko of the University of California, Berkeley, the leader of one of the two teams that discovered dark energy, admits that Kepler’s supernova is a puzzle. “It is troublesome that we can’t tell for sure what kind of supernova Kepler’s object was.”Nobody is yet going as far as saying that Supernova 1604 undermines the idea that Type Ia supernovae are standard candles and, therefore, the dark energy claim. The fact remains, however, that cosmologists are putting a great deal of faith in objects that are far from well understood “It’s bothersome,” says Blair. “It’s a thorn in the side of cosmology.”Marcus Chown is the author of ‘The Universe Next Door’ (Headline).

“Stars in our galaxy do not normally move so fast.”There is a possible explanation. The explosion of a very massive star in a binary star system can cause the other star to ricochet at high speed. Van den Bergh, Kamper and others reasoned that, millions of years before the explosion of Kepler’s star, its companion had also gone supernova, sending Kepler’s star racing headlong out of our galaxy Only later had Kepler’s star itself exploded. As it would have been solitary then, it could not have been a Type Ia supernova. The only solitary stars that go supernova are much more massive stars than the Sun at the end of their lives – Type II supernovae.There was another twist. The motion of super-hot “filaments” of gas being blown outwards from the site of the explosion revealed that the star that went supernova must have been travelling out of our galaxy at about one million kilometres per hour “This is abnormally fast,” says Blair. With Los Angeles conveniently blacked out below, he was able to use the 100-inch Mount Wilson telescope to photograph the remnant of Kepler’s supernova for the first time.Baade’s designation of Kepler’s star as a Type Ia supernova, was not, however, the end of the story.

From the 1970s, astronomers, including Sidney van den Bergh and Karl Kamper of the Dominion Observatory in British Columbia, had examined the remnant with more powerful instruments such as the five-metre telescope at Mount Palomar in California. In 1943, they were scrutinised by the German-American astronomer Walter Baade, who, along with the Swiss-American Fritz Zwicky, had first recognised the existence of a distinct class of super-powerful exploding stars – supernovae.Baade reconstructed the supernova’s “light curve” – a graph of how it brightened and faded with time. He concluded it was what would be expected for a “Type Ia” supernova, which we now know is due to the explosion of an Earth-sized “white dwarf” star. De Stella Nova, published in 1606, is the main reason why supernova 1604 came to be known as “Kepler’s star”.Kepler monitored the star when it was probably at its peak brightness and rivalled Jupiter until it faded from view a year later His observations have proved invaluable.

When a companion star dumps too much material on to it, a white dwarf becomes catastrophically unstable, so that it explodes.Baade, classed as an enemy alien and unable to serve in the US military, had nothing to do during the Second World War but sit at the “prime focus” of the world’s largest telescope in California. A sceptical Johannes Kepler saw nothing of Brunowski’s star that night or the next In fact, he had to wait until 17 October. Thereafter, and until it faded into invisibility on 8 October 1605, he recorded its brightness.Kepler, whose day job was deducing his famous laws of planetary motion from the observations of his mentor Tycho Brahe, observed the star regularly, apart from a month or so between November and January when the Sun encroached on it. It must, therefore, be at a far greater distance and could have no connection with the planetary conjunction Kepler wrote up all he discovered in a book. Crucially, he determined that the new star did not move against the background stars, as a planet did. The German broker forecast a sharply weaker than expected profit recovery at Morrisons in the wake of the tie-up.