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."'"

This shouldn't have surprised anyone

[damn_registrars]

Really, we've been talking about the Economic basis of spam [slashdot.org] for some time. I've commented [slashdot.org] and journaled [slashdot.org] 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.