The real Internet bad boys

From The New York Times:

In their persistent quest to breach the Internet’s defenses, the bad guys are honing their weapons and increasing their firepower.

With growing sophistication, they are taking advantage of programs that secretly install themselves on thousands or even millions of personal computers, band these computers together into an unwitting army of zombies, and use the collective power of the dragooned network to commit Internet crimes.

These systems, called botnets, are being blamed for the huge spike in spam that bedeviled the Internet in recent months, as well as fraud and data theft.

Security researchers have been concerned about botnets for some time because they automate and amplify the effects of viruses and other malicious programs.

What is new is the vastly escalating scale of the problem — and the precision with which some of the programs can scan computers for specific information, like corporate and personal data, to drain money from online bank accounts and stock brokerages.

“It’s the perfect crime, both low-risk and high-profit,” said Gadi Evron, a computer security researcher for an Israeli-based firm, Beyond Security, who coordinates an international volunteer effort to fight botnets. “The war to make the Internet safe was lost long ago, and we need to figure out what to do now.”

This is not good news. The criminals behind this are, for the most part Eastern European. They have discovered that they can steal more safely this way than by sticking a gun in someone's face. Although they will do that if they feel the need to.

The Internet is one of the greatest boons to mankind to come from the 20th Century, but its increasing penetration by these preditors is threatening to render it useless.

When you add the threat posed by hostile nations, such as Red China and Iran, to the mix the picture starts to look grim indeed.

I don't know what the ansere is, but the person or comapny that comes up with it will get very rich, or very much richer.