Symantec warns of "parasitic storage"

Security specialist Symantec has warned businesses over an increasing trend for criminals to use "parasitic storage" on networks of compromised systems.

While botnets -- illegal networks of PCs infected with remote software by hackers -- are used mainly for sending spam, criminals are increasingly storing sensitive or illegal data in distributed environments, the security company told our sister site ZDNet UK on Tuesday.

While saying that the risk is not major, Symantec has warned businesses that PCs can be hijacked and used by criminals to store data. As most computers have space on hard drives and don't completely utilise RAM, thousands of linked, compromised computers can be harnessed for data storage.