On Monday 29 August 2005 11:00 pm, Miark wrote: > On Mon, 29 Aug 2005 21:59:40 -0400, JoeHill wrote: > > You know, if you leave your car unlocked with the keys in the > > ignition and a big sign that says 'free for the taking', I > > hardly see how one could be prosecuted for stealing it, let > > alone breaking into it. > > The one guy _paid_ the other to write the worm. Why the hell > would somebody do that?
Common practice for most trojans/worms of late. Organized criminals, including spammers, are using the worms to gather networks of zombie PC's that they can use for nefarious purposes, including identity theft, DoS attacks used for extortion attempts, and spam sending. These networks are either used directly, or sold to the highest bidder. So, either they directly commission the writing of worms, or they buy the networks from the writers, or criminal middle-men commission the writing, and then sell the networks of zombies. If you have been following security news, you will see the AV companies noting that a lot of the follow-up variants of worms are written to remove previous variants or at least turn off their controllers, thus wresting control of the zombie PC from one gang to another. That is, as always, criminals fighting for turf.
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