Paranoid types indulging in inappropriate surfing may wish to wear tin helmets over their tin-foil hats, if the security bloggers over at F-Secure in Helsinki are to be believed. As their blog relates, the researches have a mashup in the lab that uses Google Earth to plot the location of computers that probe their network (and thus are assumed to be hackers or zombie botnet recruits) “[We use it to] get a feeling of where on the globe these machines are, in real-time,” the boffins note.

So far, so whatever. Well, last year F-Secure played host to a bunch of braid-laden US military top brass, who took more than a little interest in this bad-guy pinpointing. One of the brass hats, on seeing the level of zoom-in possible with Google’s imagery, “made a comment along the lines of ‘that would be accurate enough to bomb it’.”

The labs boys took this as a joke. Until they read in the papers that “the Department of Defense is prepared, based on the authority of the president, to launch a cyber counterattack or an actual bombing of an attack source...”

So if you’re up to no good online, and hear a whistling sound overhead, as it gets louder there will be a few seconds in which you’ll know who to blame for giving the US the idea.