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The 'Malware Economy' Evolves
superglaze writes "ZDNet UK has a feature on how the malware economy is turning into a recognizable traditional IT economy. Leasing botnets? Malware support? Welcome to the new age of computing. As the piece suggests, it's all gone Darwinian. 'One indication of the maturity of the black economy, according to Telafici, was the recent case of a hacker who wrote a packer [software used to bypass antivirus protection], "threw in the towel recently as it wasn't profitable enough -- there's too much competition. They opened the source code and walked away."'"
So you're saying the editor is a slacker and the hacker who wrote the packer should be a cracker?
Well, back to rejecting software patent applications.
Really, we've been talking about the Economic basis of spam for some time. I've commented and journaled on how the economics of spam make most current solutions meaningless in the greater fight.
So now when we see yet another article discussing the money that is made in malware, particularly the botnets that drive spammers, there's no reason why anyone should find this surprising.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
This is only logical. A criminal will work for the quick buck. BnE is great when lots of people are leaving their windows open and you are the only burglar, but once every one is on the BnE bandwagonit's time to switch to mugging or extortion.
We are the Borg...
I keep getting spam traffic from her that is reassigned from a myriad of outlook express ex-emailers. I have told her that she will have to get her OS reinstalled but she just won't listen. I am afraid that the windows OS and the Microsoft way of computing has done little more than create a shit load of computer using zombies and little old ladies (like my aunt) who in blissful ignorance just keep up the status quo. The result of this blissful ignorance is that bot nets have become almost impossible to kill.
This message was not sent from an iPhone because Peter Sellers really was a deviated prevert without a dime for the call
malware is great!
such as Alibaba.com, a chinese company, well known for the malware 3721, can even make IPO for more than 1.3 billon dollars.
that's why it is called "Historic IPO"
I don't get it. One of the most popular uses for a botnet, according to the article, is for spam mailings. But how can spammers afford to pay any significant amount of money for the service? I understand that they're mailing out to millions of people and count on a high level of rejection, but how many people are stupid enough to open something that says, "5PL1t H3R 1n HALF WYTH YORE HUGE ORGAN"? Let's face it, half the population is female, and probably not interested (unless they're buying for their boyfriend, and wouldn't THAT be a kick-ass Christmas present); a majority of the male half of the population are probably reasonably satisfied with their equipment; and even a vast majority of those poor, pathetic guys who actually have "AY tiney Pinnus That You GIrflrend Lauff at" probably have an IQ in at least the high double digits (I mean, they figured out how to turn on a computer and collect their e-mail, at least). So they probably wouldn't open that message either.
And then there's the spam filters, which are getting pretty good these days.
So that leaves what percentage of the population stupid enough to open one of these things and infect their computers with something vile? And if they're that stupid, how likely is it that they have a bank account worth looting? Or that they haven't been hit before so often they just sign their paycheque over to the spammers automatically and save everybody a lot of trouble?
Help. Somebody please explain it all to me.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
This has to do with SPAM and not botnets...
It's been said before, probably better than I can: The "mark" in the spam economy is NOT the person receiving the email. The "mark" is the person foolish enough to buy the Spam-in-a-box kit thinking they will be able to get a single person to buy their w0tches or v1agra. The money in spam is made not from the person foolish enough to buy the w0tches. The money is made in selling the service to spam millions of people.
I would have to say that explosives are the most abused technology in all of history.
No kidding :-) I said in a public forum about 4 years ago that botnets are the first and only successful example of commercial utility computing, where a vendor tries to rent out time on large compute clusters.
This works much better for botnet vendors than for Amazon EC2 or HP Utility Data Center, because the really valuable resource the botnets are renting is a routable IP address that hasn't been shut down yet. Computers are nearly free, but IP addresses that work are not.
There's copyright protection on an product designed for illegal use? Isn't that like complaining that someone stole your cocaine?
Here's the actual paper from which came most of the material in the article: "The Commercial Malware Industry", from the University of Auckland. More technical details.
New threats of interest: