Botnet Business Model Comes to Life 192
consumerist writes "Researchers at the German Honeynet Project have discovered that a malicious hacker earned about $430 in a single day installing spyware on computers in the latest Windows worm attack. Within 24 hours, the IRC-controlled botnet hijacked more than 7,700 machines via the Windows Server Service vulnerability (MS06-040) and hosed the infected computers with the spyware from DollarRevenue. The botnet operator made between a penny and 30 cents for every piece of spyware installed. Add that to the spam rental and DDoS extortion money and we have a booming business."
Your math is bad: $430/day = $67K/year (Score:4, Informative)
Try it this way. 240 working days a year x $430/day = $103,200
If you're an independent contractor, expect something like 35% tax.
That gets you down to about $67K/year.
Re:Most bots are not resource hogs (Score:4, Informative)
The point is that virii is not the plural of virus. Virus is the plural of virus in latin, and Viruses is the plural of virus in english. For Virii to even make sense as a Latin Plural of the Second Declension, the singular would have to be Virius. Not Virus. If Virus declined as a second declension noun, it would be viri -- confusable with the plural of the word that can be translated as 'hero or man' depending on context.
It's not that we're pedants -- I don't mind when someone corrects me when I'm wrong. What we're angry about is how ignorance has become acceptable. It used to be, when you were ignorant of something, you were corrected and you learned from it. How would you feel about this sort of behaviour if, instead of the virus/virri debate, it was TCP/IP/tubes debate?