What are
malicious programs
and who writes them
Why are malicious program written and who writes them?
People who write these malicious programs can be classified broadly into two
groups. They are:
a) Cyber vandals
b) Serious programmers
Both these cyber vandals and serious programmers can be further classified
into two groups. Let us now understand these two main groups of malicious
program writers.
Cyber vandals:
These are people who writes program just to test their programming skills.
These people fall into the first category of cyber vandals. They are not
written with the aim of affecting any system. This type of malicious program
normally dies when the system is either reformatted or when upgraded. They
are normally written by young programmers who have just learned programming
and want to check out the knowledge that they have gained.
Second category of cyber vandals is also students who are mastering the art
of programming. However, these people would have taken a conscious decision
that they would devote their programming skills towards creation of
malicious programs or malware, in short, virus writing.
These people make the maximum utilization of the Internet to learn about
malicious programs and also get in touch with veteran virus writers through
chat to get to know more about malware. These people misuse the internet to
create and spread malicious programs or malware.
Serious programmers:
Majority of us would have heard about the term "script kiddies." These
people belong to this category of serious programmers. For those who do not
know who a script kiddy is, let me give a brief introduction. A script kiddy
is not a very technology sound person. He is a person who without
understanding the pros and cons of what he is doing, will try to explore the
vulnerabilities or weakness of a system. This group of people is considered
to be dangerous. Unfortunately, their team has grown in large numbers
secretly and their main objective is to write viruses and spread it across
over the Internet. These set of people try to understand the vulnerabilities
of a system or application and try to penetrate through it.
Second category of serious programmers is also referred to as
"proof-of-concept" malware authors. They actually do not spread the source
code of the virus, however, discuss about the newly created virus in
discussion forums and blogs related to virus writing. This set of
programmers is often the most talented and find out the vulnerabilities in
an operating system or hardware.
Even though they do not spread viruses, as they discuss about them in
various virus writing forums, this may in turn help other malware writers to
spread viruses.
Reason for writing viruses or malicious programs:
We saw who writes viruses and the different categories of people who write
them; let us see why they write in the coming paragraphs.
Scam or fraud:
In one way, everybody of us are happy with the advent of Internet. However,
on the other hand, it has given opportunity to virus writers and fraudulent
people to gain entry. They spread viruses through e-mail messages, web
hosting, etc. They have written numerous Trojans, which help them steal the
login information of various Internet users and gain access to their
information easily.
Do you know when the first password stealing Trojan appeared? It was in the
year 1997 and their main objective was to gain access to AOL. Wondering why
would people steal login information. It is very simple. People who do not
wish to pay much for surfing the Internet try to gain access to these
Internet Service Providers (ISP). Later in 1998, similar password stealing
Trojans started appearing for other Internet Service Providers (ISP) too.
During the initial periods, antivirus companies used to catch such Trojans
in large numbers. However, as the cost of Internet access has reduced to a
great extent, these passwords stealing Trojans have reduced to a larger
extent.
You would be amazed to know that another major target of these malicious
program writers are computer games. They do this because they feel that
everything over the Internet should be shared among people freely and those
who are not financially strong to afford for playing computer games.
Structured cyber crime:
Virus writers who have become professional writers are dangerous to the
Internet community. They directly or indirectly steal money from people,
directly in the way of theft and indirectly using zombie or automated
machines. Other ways of structured cyber crime include blackmailing,
creation and/or selling spam software, Denial of Service (DoS) attacks.
In the recent past, virus writers either work for a designated set of people
or they create spamming software and sell it for the highest bidder. They
create these spamming applications and use it efficiently. These are
designed in such a way that even antivirus software and adware programs will
not be able to find them. These programs are installed without the knowledge
of the computer user.
Another example would be stealing of money from e-wallets, Paypal accounts,
Internet banking, etc. This kind of cyber crime is done mainly for financial
gain. These Trojans collect information pertaining to username, password,
etc. from local computers and sometimes even from corporate servers and send
them diligently to the virus writers.
Internet rackets:
Another form of cyber crime is Internet rackets. Wondering what these
rackets are! Main objective of these Internet rackets are blackmailing
companies whose major revenue comes because of their online presence, which
include e-stores, banking websites, gambling websites, etc. These virus
writers create a network of zombie machines that are proficient in carrying
out a DoS attack. They then start blackmailing.
Virus writers ensure that the software that they have created are not
detected by antivirus software and update their software regularly for this
purpose. Among the four categories of virus writers, it is the serious virus
writing professionals who sell their services are a threat to the growing
Internet world.