Gone are the days when they bragged about their successes – today it is a more driven approach towards making money rather than actually the thrill of hacking systems. They prefer to raise an army of botnet computers rather than the quick crippling attacks of the past.
The silent approach helps the hacker to remain in a compromised system longer to spread slowly and keep control of an army of computers so compromised at their disposal. Many of the newer viruses spread primarily through social engineering — tricking a user into opening an e-mail attachment by making a message appear legitimate.
A botnet is a large number of compromised computers that are used to create denial of service attacks or send spam. The computer is compromised via a Trojan that often opens an IRC channel and waits for commands from the person in control of the botnet.
"If they are able to stay active longer, they make more money," said Alfred Huger, senior director of engineering with the security response team at Symantec Corp., a software vendor that issued its twice-annual state-of-security report Monday.
The difference between the old style of attack and the new one is that the total shutdown attacks of the past can be taken care of within a couple of days while the newer kind remain undetected for a longer time as there is minimal apparant damage.
Virus writers have also judiciously used Web sites with software vulnerabilities allowing for the spread of malicious code. They will remove the malicious programs once enough users are infected and restore the malware later, Huger said. Hence the new code of conduct...
