This doesn't seem to have received much attention, but the world's most powerful supercomputer entered operation recently... This may be the first time that a top 10 supercomputer has been controlled not by a government or megacorporation but by criminals. The question remains, now that they have the world's most powerful supercomputer system at their disposal, what are they going to do with it? Peter Gutmann TOP500.In theory, according to Peter Gutmann (the academic that rates the speed of world's biggest corporate supercomputing clusters at TOP500), the most powerful supercomputing cluster in the world (by one to two orders of magnitude) is a private criminal network called the Storm botnet. As a reminder, the Storm botnet was built through the propagation of a beautifully designed computer worm. Why do I think it is beautiful? It's an instantiation of open source warfare in software.
It's important to note that this estimate of computing power is just theory. The software necessary, like Grid, to turn it into a decentralized supercomputing platform may not be in place. However, the ability to do so is real. If it is installed, it could provide the resources necessary to analyze vast amounts of structured and unstructured data (for intelligence/opportunities), run business software of incredible capacity (if they were properly constructed: market systems beyond the capacity of the NASDAQ or supply chain software well beyond Walmart's), decrypt the most sensitive communications or access control systems via brute force (for example, it could blast through the defenses of any financial network in the world), etc. Another interesting aspect of this is that Storm is only one of example of many existing botnets, and it is nearly impossible to eradicate (it is resilient).
I anticipate that the first group to use a supercomputing network like this to grow, as a movement/community rather than merely as a parasite, has the potential to zoooooom past nations/companies of a much larger size.