Slashdot Mirror
Bad Guys Use Open Source, Too
First time accepted submitter colinneagle writes "Open source has been so successful in giving us software like Linux, Apache, Hadoop, etc., why wouldn't the open source method work with other types of software? Probably no one expected that the criminals behind vast malware trojans would adopt open source methods to make their malware more dangerous, but they have. According to this report from Seculert Research, the makers of Citadel, a variant of the Zeus Trojan are using open source models to hone their code and make the Trojan more dangerous."
Their grammar's great, too.
-
...Malware writers are using *gasp* coding to further their goals?!? Horrorz!
Consistency is only a virtue if you're not a screw-up.
Sure but what license are they using? I make sure all my malware is GPL3. None of that BSD licensed malware for me!
Why should only the criminal side of the malware equation get the benefits of open-source?
The author is right, nobody would have ever thought that the kind of people who lurk in the computer underground would ever use open source tools or methods to develop their malware. We all thought that "those people" were paying Microsoft for copies of Visual Studio and writing all of their code based explicitly on MSDN code samples.