A new age (Score 1)

Wow, yeah I find this news quite amazing. When I think of a hacker a nerdy 20 something year old comes to mind typing away on a computer with a box of pizza and 2 liter of mountain dew at hand. This is something different though. By actually selling these illegal products to anyone who can afford them, these hackers are gaining respect as well as funding, which is crucial to the advancement of their nefarious deeds. It sounds like the attacks are all browser based, coming through yet to be patched versions of Internet Explorer. I think, in the short term at least, victims of these attacks will begin switching to alternate browser solutions (such as Opera or Firefox) to avoid the problems associated with IE. However, as more people switch, the attackers will simply direct their attacks at the alternate browsers, bringing everyone back to square one. From there perhaps the open source community supporting Firefox will direct their energies toward combating the hackers' exploits, or the victims may go so far as to switch operating systems to Mac or Linux instead of Windows. All of this, however, is based on Microsoft losing their patch fight against the hackers and the hackers continuing to sell their code and grow their business through ever greater levels of dominance. What would be interesting is if the hacker companies grow powerful enough so that standard anti virus software can no longer compete with them. At that point we may see malicious software from competing companies specifically designed to target and destroy their competitors' code. A digital war if you will. In any case the future will hold some interesting outcomes.