Why do people create malware?

[tempo1]

Your arm-chair psychoanalysis of the "typical" malware coder, would have been pretty much right on target...oh maybe in the year 1998. You view is the stereotypical view that has been reinforced, incorrectly, by Hollywood and the MSM for years. You know...the teenaged, pimply-faced, white male who has never been laid, engaging in cyber-vandalism from the basement of his mother's house!

Today it's all about making money.

Perhaps Eugene Kaspersky, founder of anti-virus maker Kaspersky Labs said it best, " It's a different world today. 10 years ago, we were fighting against smart kids who hacked as a hobby. Now, we're dealing with criminal gangs that control your computer to make money. Different world, different protections."
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,207...21806EP24A

Do you really think that the recent DDoS attack on Twitter just suddenly stopped on its own? More likely is that a flood of TCP/SYN packets from thousands of commandeered "zombie computers" which had been organized into a "botnet", stopped only after Twitter paid a large sum of cash. Probably to a criminal enterprise in eastern Europe, places where good jobs are still scarce after suffering under decades of socialist misery.

But, "that's extortion", you say. DING DING....exactly! And these DDoS attacks are a huge and growth industry. Mostly run against popular websites, financial institutions, and for some reason, the cyber-gangsta's favorite...online gambling sites.

Ever wonder where the spam that clogs your inbox comes from? Much of it comes from thousands of zombies, individual computers that have compromised by malware, all tied together into a botnet, making one helluva big commercial (and illicit) e mail server. A growth industry for sure. Big bux!

Need some freshly stolen credit card numbers? No problem. In fact it was said that at one point last year that there was such a glut of stolen account numbers available on the internet, that the bad-guys were giving out free samples!

Need to do a mass e mailing of say 1 million Viagra advertisements to random addresse?. No problem, probably cost you $100 or less to spam 1,000,000 people.

But wait, there's more!

Wanna buy your own trojan do-it-yourself kit and get in on the action, without even needing much technical expertise? Readily available in IRC chatrooms (it usually DOES help to speak Russian). MPack seems popular these days:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPack_(software)

All readily availible...for a price...on the Internets.

It's a constant cat and mouse gave, one that the good-guys are not winning.

And as long as there are places where the authorities are corrupt and easily bribed, it will continue.

Nope, malware is far too sophisticated these days to be coded by "losers, with a grudge" in their spare time.