Hackers will settle your scores online (prices start at £50)
By Charles Arthur, Technology Editor
31 July 2004
Organised criminals have drawn up a price list for internet attacks ranging from raids on betting websites to sending e-mails for spammers.
A multi-million pound underground economy is growing up through the sophisticated use of internet sabotage involving extortion, blackmail and fraud.
Sending a million e-mails to an enemy costs up to £50. A programme to hijack users' internet browsers to display a pornography site will set you back around £200. And between £8,000 and £12,000 will buy a full-blown assault on a website.
This week two new computer viruses emerged which proved that their writers no longer do it for idle recreation. Instead, they aim to set up "zombie networks" of thousands of virus-infected PCs, to offer as tools for criminals to exploit and attack the wider internet.
On Monday the MyDoom.O virus spread so rapidly that it took over thousands of machines around the world, with the side-effect of paralysing the search engine Google because the virus used it to search for more machines to infect.
Within 48 hours a second virus, called Zindos, appeared which used only those machines infected with MyDoom.O to launch an attack on Microsoft's website.
"Zindos was able to use those machines because it knew the equivalent of the secret knock on the door that could control them," said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at the antivirus company Sophos. "Both viruses were written by the same guy. And it's clear some viruses are written purely to create a network of 'zombie' machines which can be used to do anything the virus writer wants."
A "zombie" machine appears normal, but unseen to the user, an electronic "back door" allows the virus writer to control it remotely, to send out e-mails, store pornography, or attack a particular site. The only way to reclaim such a machine is to run up-to-date antivirus software and use a firewall to prevent unknown internet links.
However, many people are ignorant of those dangers. There are hundreds of thousands of such virus-infected "zombie" machines worldwide, security experts reckon. They are organised into separate groups, controlled by the owners of the viruses which infected them.
The most valuable use now for such "zombie" systems is to launch "distributed denial of service" (DDOS) attacks on websites which have to offer online services, particularly betting and financial organisations. The DDOS uses the zombie machines to make the internet equivalent of a phone call - and then hang up immediately. With thousands of machines each doing this hundreds of times per second, the site is overwhelmed by fake requests. (snipped)
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/science_technology/story.jsp?story=546481
They've been selling zombies to spammers and kiddy porn people for a while.
I'd bet that a lot of money will be changing hands soon. I'd even go so far as to say that there was a commission involved; a bounty on as many systems as possible for a REALLY big ddos flood. Who would be interested in such a thing? (rhetorical)