Norton Symantec Blog

The hacker’s life

So we all know that there are viruses on the internet. But do we know exactly where they come from in the first place. Peter Gutmann, who works as a researcher at the University of Auckland, was quoted in a Guardian article commenting that, ‘a good virus programmer can makes as much as $200,000 a year’, making it very much a viable career path. Perhaps even a lucrative one.

Perhaps what is a little more worrying than this, is the fact that people can now purchase ‘services’ online, aimed specifically at causing confusion online. Wendy Grossman notes how, ‘malware writers have changed from amateurs who want bragging rights to a full blown criminal – and commercial – market. The chains of events leading to attacks can involve as many as six or seven different players: one hacks the website, another writes the exploit toolkit, the third writes the botnet and rents it out at 4¢ per PC, and so on. If you know where to go, you can buy a one-day distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack for $100 (£50), send 10m spam emails for $600, send 1m spam IMs for $150, or pick up 50Mb of stolen bank and credit card accounts for as little as $30.’

So where exactly do these hackers lurk? Well, according to some industry sources you have to know complicated URLs to locate their list of services, then they jump from one domain to another. They loiter menacingly in the backwaters of the World Wide Web.

The lesson perhaps is still to be learnt by some: using the Internet can be a risky business. So make sure that you are protected.