At first it was just the juvenile hijinks of some very skillful hackers, who became crackers. Then they shared their goodies with wannabe crackers we called “script kiddies” and there were far more of them, so incidents rose. Then someone realized it could be profitable, and every decent cracker became either a crook or a cop, as it were, and some played both sides. But the days of merely destructive software are gone, and all of it now has a commercial purpose.
Recently, I feel certain some of it is government spying at work, disguised as criminal acts. Why not, since they often do criminal acts disguised as spying?
It need not be that some government employee or contractor actually writes a worm or virus, only that they make use of one for their own purposes. For example, this Stuxnet beast infecting machines running SCADA software. While the Forbes blogger notes the scanning data from Symantec is biased, you have to wonder if this isn’t some signal to those watching. That is, given the report says most of the infections are in Iran’s SCADA networks, stealing data on their electricity generation and transmission, it screams at us someone is using it to spy on Iran for purely political reasons.
It makes not a whit of difference where the bot-herder is based, since the CIA is everywhere, and can hire anybody with our tax dollars for the most unconscionable evils, and a great many CIA agents possess no conscience in the first place. So if you follow this line of thinking, and consider there are other US clandestine agencies composed of sociopaths who serve the state as god, other wide-spread computer infections might well be under their control.
Remember, they are sociopaths, and no amount of harm to no amount of citizens makes any difference, except as a perverse form of entertainment. They get paid to destroy the taxpayers who provide their salaries. That any such infection of virus or worm also affects many who are not targeted is simply collateral damage. For such people, there is no such thing as an innocent bystander. Given Microsoft, and most every other major corporation with lobbyists, is in cahoots with the federal government (despite appearances and noisy prosecutions which accomplish nothing), might it not help to explain their lackadaisical attitude about fixing known flaws?
If it were my job to develop and run such spying programs, you can be sure such ideas would cross my mind, and I’m not especially bright.
