We all have come in contact with those wonderful little bugs over the Internet. Whether it's the latest spam thread on myspace.com or a potent virus found in emails, these little fuckers have been getting PC users (and to a lesser extent Mac users) by the short and curlies ever since the Internet first became popular in the 1990s. Where do all of these come from though? Like most people I at first just thought it was a handful of people just trying to screw up things, but upon reading an article on it from zdnet.co.uk it turns out that many of the viruses and spam we receive and deal with on a regular basis come from a vast underground network not too dissimilar to the mafia.
It pretty much rounds out like this. Someone hires one or several people to write the code for these viruses. They negotiate payment then the coders in turn hire even more people to send out these viruses. As stated in the initial article
Security experts are increasingly pointing to the existence of a "black" or "shadow" cyber-economy, where malware services are sold online using the same kinds of development methods and guarantees given by legitimate software vendors.
So the Trojan you get in an email from someone on your contact list stating "this website/picture/game/video/whatever is so cool and LOLs" it's possible that they in turn got it from numerous people; networks, within networks.
In short even the world of malware isn't safe from free market capitalism. This I suppose goes along with the phrase "If a dollar is to be made, people will do it."
What interests me the most about this topic is just the sheer idea that even in something that seems so random as viruses and spam there is still such an organized crime network. Professionals are still unsure just how organized this "black cyber-economy" is but in one example used in the article they sure as hell know how to pack a punch. The UK is and has been continually hit by a piece of Malware named "storm." This is a malware "bot" that was created that sent emails saying "230 Dead as Storm Batters Europe." When people open this email they get the virus. An employee of the well known antivirus company McAfee had this to say about "Storm."
"Storm has been exceptionally successful...It's used for spam runs, and researchers attempting to locate Storm command and control servers have come under attack. The hardest part is finding the key to those channels. They're not always easy to detect and find. Some of the communications are encrypted, while some are difficult to detect from a network point of view. I hate to use the word evolution, but they're certainly learning from their successes and failures. If it weren't for Storm, bots would be in significant recession. Some days we're seeing 1,000 different variants a day"
Like some weird Frankenstein's Monster, Storm is still evolving and learning to this day. Every new version of it takes lessons from the previous versions and it's becoming harder and harder for anti-virus/malware professionals to reverse its damage.
The real question though is who is making the money from these programs besides the anti-malware professionals? Those who have been caught are primarily just small players who are trying to pick up some extra cash. No John Gottis of the cyber world have been found (yet), but the competition is still fierce. One programmer, after creating a "packer" which is a program used to bypass computer security, ended up calling it quits after he just could not get a break. One thing that must be realized is it's not just other programmers these coders are going against; bots such as "Storm" are becoming more and more prevalent in the malware underground. Just like in a lot of modern industry and factory positions, why pay multiple people to send out these viruses when you can just as easily only pay one person to create a single program that can do the job quickly and more proficiently.
The internet is as much of a jungle as any other industry is. Be it buying stocks on Wall St., writing for a paper, or just being a cook at a bar, times are moving fast and money is moving even faster. The human instinct of adaptability is audacious in all respects and those who don't move with the rest of the trend are going to get trampled. I'm not saying I condone the act of purposely making people's lives a living hell, but one thing I will say is in this unsteady economic climate, making people miserable is the only service that will never go out of style.
This is a topic I happen to have great interest in and I'm going to be writing about it much more in the future as soon as I can get more information on it. I hope to make this into a complete investigative report eventually including interviews with programmers and players in the cyber-economy. Tune in later this week for part two. As for now, as always, Cheers.
-Jonny Gonzo
citation and quotes taken from original article "Cracking open the cybercrime economy" by Tom Espiner http://resources.zdnet.co.uk/articles/features/0,1000002000,39291463-2,00.htm
