Fergie's Tech Blog

Online Criminal Gangs Battle With Botnets

Sharon Gaudin writes on InformationWeek:

Two or three online criminal gangs are waging an all-out battle for control of the largest botnets, sending out waves of malware aimed at stealing zombie computers from rival gangs to build up their own army.

Each online gang is trying to build up the biggest botnet because the bigger the army of infected computers they control, the more money spammers and hackers will pay to use them, explains Shane Coursen, a senior technical consultant for Kaspersky Lab. Since the gangs have their own botnets already built up, they're all trying to pilfer victimized computers from their rivals, to diminish their competitor's botnets while they build up their own.

"It's an ongoing war," said Coursen in an interview with InformationWeek. "The Internet is flooded with machines that already are compromised. What better way to take ownership of a machine than to get into one that is already owned. They can take advantage of it. It's like an open door to these guys."

posted by Fergie @ 5/18/2007 02:07:00 PM