Writing the preceding article got me thinking about how Hacking is changing. It used to be that people tried to penetrate networks or websites purely as an intellectual exercise, or they had a vendetta against a particular company or organisation because of political reasons. But now, we are seeing a definite shift towards Hacking for criminal gain. Vincent Weafer, Los Angeles-based senior director of development for Symantec Security Response, believes that crime for profit motivation has really found the Internet. No longer are we at the mercy of some geek who wants to infect your machine with a virus for the sheer hell of it - now we are most definitely facing organised crime.
Today, says Weafer, full-blown thieves lurk in cyberspace armed with tools capable of sucking confidential information out of unprotected computers. They can also turn them into zombies and rent them to organized crime for a few hundred dollars as part of a so-called "bot nets" used to flood the web with dubious spam.