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.
Sean-Paul Correll is a threat researcher at PandaLabs, the malware analysis and detection laboratory for Panda Security. Correll is credited with discovering the Twitter trending topics attacks, as well as for leading groundbreaking research on social networking cybercrime and Blackhat SEO. Correll serves as a frequent resource for national and security press, including USA Today, PC World, Computerworld, InformationWeek and many others.
Luis Corrons is technical director of PandaLabs, the malware analysis and detection laboratory for Panda Security, where he has worked since 1999. Luis started in Panda's technical support department, helping both consumer and corporate users with virus incidents. A year later, he joined the international technical support team providing tech support for Panda's partners, distributed in more than 50 countries around the world. In 2002, he became PandaLabs' director as well as malware alerts coordinator in worldwide infection situations, dealing with worms such as Klez, SQLSlammer, Sobig, Blaster, Sasser and Mydoom.