The Shadowserver Foundation reports that the CIA, PayPal and hundreds of other organizations are being bombarded with unexplained requests.

"The 'massive' flood of requests is made over the websites' SSL, or secure-sockets layer, port, causing them to consume more resources than normal connections," writes The Register's Dan Goodin.

"The torrent started about a week ago and appears to be caused by recent changes made to a botnet known as Pushdo," Goodin writes.

Click here to read the article at The Register.