Viruses. Why do they do it?

I get a lot of questions from questions from customers that I am happy to answer. The three most common are related to viruses.

Why do they (virus writers) do this?

How did I get it?

How do I prevent this from happening again?

We'll take them in order over the coming days. Today we cover the 'why' question.

The short answer is that there is money to be made. A lot of it. Long gone are the days where a viruses sole purpose is to eject your CD-Rom drive or cause your keyboard to type incorrect letters. Data and information is the commodity of the Internet age.

Viruses are appropriately named and very analogous to human viruses. They spread from one place to another, repeating their process again and again. Somebody (actually many somebodies) have the cold right now. Somebody (several million somebodies) are infected with computer viruses right now. From experience cleaning them, those infected computers have multiple viruses at one time.

Theft of information on the Internet requires a new level of thinking in scale and purpose. Many people's concept of stealing a Credit Card is still centered on one person targeting another in a one on one situation as it is done the 'real' world. Viruses are automated thieves running 24/7. The number of active viruses out there broke the one million mark in 2008. That is just the number of active viruses. In Panda Security's 2009 report, they stated that their virus library over the past 20 years has reached 40 million samples. That's 40,000,000. Most of them occurring in the past decade. That's a lot of viruses moving through a lot of computers at any given time.

Identities, Credit Card numbers, login information, passwords, and company data are bought and sold every minute. The number affected is in the millions each year and rising. Credit Cards can be bought for pennies when purchased in bulk on the black market. Bank account numbers and credentials usually cost more due to their usable lifespan before detection of the theft. Sometimes in the thousands of dollars.

Corporations and Government agencies have data that is target for theft. The James Bond of today is also a virtual one stealing intelligence information. Think of all the new technology that comes out yearly. Profits in the billions for the right new technology or insider trading tip.

In our next post we will cover how infections are spread