Hacking for Dollars

Although the dot-com boom has come and gone, and we're well into Web 2.0, online criminals are just starting to cash in. Not long ago, malicious coders experimented with propagating code across the Internet via worms and viruses. Although mass digital epidemics became common, viruses and worms were rare. That's all changed. Malicious code has become a key element of the growth of online crime. It's no longer good enough for a fraudster to compromise a PC, unless that computer can be turned into cash.

For criminals, a wide selection of software that helps separate unwitting folks from their money is available on the gray market (and not all of it is illegal). For upstanding citizens, this means that the threat keeps changing while the defenses have lagged behind. A simple name for malicious code no longer exists. Crimeware, the blanket term for code aimed at garnering cash, can take on many faces. For example, the characteristic that defined viruses and worms?the ability to self-propagate efficiently?is usually not desirable for criminals because of the high risk of exposure and the massive overhead of dealing with all the files on victims' machines.