The Scope of the Conflict
Friday, February 23, 2007
It's 5am. For you, the working person, a busy day is just dawning. After a shower, clothes, coffee, and all the other essentials, another essential follows: e-mail. In the fast-paced world we live in, not even work correspondence need wait until work. With the press of a button, the home computer's humming and, with screen aglow, the real day has just begun.
Half a world away, where darkness is falling on a similar day, someone else is readying for a different sort of work. A similar press of a button sends the computer into action, and with a few keystrokes a call is transmitted across thousands of miles. A postmodern call to arms, sent in bits and bytes, rather than horns or drums. In a fraction of a second, the first replies arrive.
Your computer is among them.
Your e-mail machine, perhaps used for the odd YouTube clip or even a bit of Solitaire, is priceless in the hands of the professional hacker: in his hands, your computer could be a repository of personal information, an advertising machine, a fraudulent trap, a cache of illegal materials, or even a weapon capable of taking-down the largest of sites. And the hacker can do so with near-impunity.
In a world few people are even aware of, a war is taking place.
Don't believe it? Check out stories like "Fraudsters Declare War on Anti-Scam Services" Great sites devoted to fighting malware through forums (CastleCops) or fighting rootkits (GMER) or battling spam, which now makes up more than 2/3 of all e-mails sent (Spamhaus), are finding themselves bombarded with targeted DDoS attacks of all flavors, attempted compromises, and every other attack imaginable. Having served on the Server Support team for one such malware-help forum, I can testify to the sheer amount of malicious activity levied against the good-guys each and every day. Heck, it's enough to make some businesses withdraw from the battle. When a scammer's money is at stake, he or she will go to great lengths to keep the fraud alive.
I hope to expand upon some of these issues, such as the shift from adware and spyware bundling to botnets in terms of online malware fraud, the battle between rival Chinese pharmacy spammers (Warezov) and Russian stock-pumping spammers (Storm Worm), and the fascinating world of carders, crackers, malware-writers, and professional computer criminals. I may not be paperghost, but I have my sources. ;)
~ Nexus7
Labels: botnets, internet war, spam
posted by David @ 11:29 AM,
