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."'"

Open source malware?

[spun]

That's a FUD goldmine, or a FUDmine, if you will. Damn, OSS enemies will be crowing about this: "open source leads to VIRUSES and MALWARE! Open source hackers create programs to take over your computer, how can you trust them?"

Malware and ex-emailer

[deviated_prevert]

As I receive spam my conclusion is that the majority of bot nets are created by people like my Aunt. She thinks she is safe because she uses some obscure malware and e-mail detection system that seems to have appeared like magic to rescue her from the perils of the net. However her windows 98 kernel has obviously been rooted and she does not even know it.

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.

Re:No shortage of idiots

[Colin Smith]

Help. Somebody please explain it all to me.

It's just arithmetic. Lets say...

A bottle of V|4GR4 costs me £1.99 and sells for £9.99
It takes 2 seconds to mail a spam mail.
My broadband costs £14.99 per month.

I basically need to make 3 sales per month to make a profit.

There are 2592000 seconds in a month, it takes 2s to send each mail, that's 1.3 million spam mails.

Only 0.0002% of the population mailed to need buy a bottle of V|4GR4 to make a profit.

50% of the population have an IQ of 100 or lower. Basically I'm on to a winner.

Re:Only high profit crime

[binaryspiral]

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 bandwagon, it's time to switch to mugging or extortion.

Like Patent trolling, DRM, or WGA.

Re:The real money in spam? Selling to spammers

[daveo0331]

It probably works like Amway. The vast majority of distributors never make enough money to pay for the starter kit/inventory/out of town seminars/etc and eventually quit. But, there's an endless supply of new suckers ready to try and be the next Amway millionaire, so Amway itself never dies.

Re:The real money in spam? Selling to spammers

[Anonymous Coward]

The money is made in selling the service to spam millions of people.

You are right! And I have to ask, once again, why, oh why aren't they going after the asshats who make lotsa money from this shit! The trail is there; every spam has to have a point of contact in order to benefit from it. Why aren't they cracking down on the very people who make money from spam? Who the hell else would be responsible for it?

I can hear it now; "No, I didn't send all that spam out. Someone else must have done this to gift me with $millions of e-commerce!" Bullshit!