In December 2009, Mariposa, the largest recorded botnet in history, was stopped dead in its tracks by the collaborative effort of international law enforcement officials and two leading security vendors. With more than 50% of the world?s Fortune 1000 companies and almost 13 million total computers compromised worldwide, Mariposa brought threat awareness to an entirely new level.
What's more troubling with this trend is that the malware perpetrators are changing, too. Hacking used to be limited to an elite group of sophisticated and savvy IT experts, but has now become mainstream and populated with amateur hackers. In fact, it was inexperienced hackers who masterminded Mariposa and succeeded in compromising millions of computers around the world. With myriad resources available online, hacking has become a skill that can be quickly learned by anyone with a computer.