CSM: Hacker underground erupts in virtual turf wars

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Hacker underground erupts in virtual turf wars
By Peter N. Spotts | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
from the August 22, 2005 edition

In the early days of computer attacks, when bright teens could bring down corporate systems, the point was often to trumpet a hacker's success. No longer.

In today's murky world of digital viruses, worms, and Trojan horses, the idea is to stay quiet and use hijacked computers to flood the Internet with spam, spread destructive viruses, or disgorge e-mail to choke corporate systems. Not only can networks of these compromised computers be leased or sold, experts say, they are becoming more valuable as the number of vulnerable computers slowly shrinks

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Zotob's rise and fall highlights what many see as an increasing ethical dimension to keep a clean machine, Franklin adds. The viruses of yesteryear, "where something would get on your system and blow away your boot sector just doesn't happen that much anymore." Today, the various forms of malware "are all converging in what they do. It's either looking to use your system without your knowledge to do something against other systems, or it's trying to collect information on you and combine it with information from other people" for use in fraud or identify theft schemes.

An unprotected computer running Windows XP experiences an average "survival" time of 26 minutes on the Internet before hackers identify it as vulnerable, according to the SANS Institute, a cooperative Internet security organization.

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