Web of Crime: Zombie PC Armies Designed to Suck Your Wallet Dry
[This is Part Two in a Five Part series. Part One can be found here.]
A PCWorld.com article by Erik Larken, via Yahoo! News, reports that:
As a teenager running his own online chat server in the 1990s, Barrett Lyon had no idea that the attacks routinely pounding his server would evolve into an Internet scourge that earned serious profit for online criminals.
Lyon says that he enjoyed using Internet Relay Chat, or IRC, as a place for people to share ideas and get instant answers to questions. But online, as in the real world, bringing a bunch of teenage male egos together inevitably resulted in battles, and Lyon was forced to become a de facto security expert in order to fend off frequent attempts to shut his server down.
It was "basically one big massive testosterone ego fight," Lyon says, from "kids that wanted to prove themselves." The teens of the late 1990s wrote and deployed software that became known as "bots," short for "robots"--programs created to attack each other and to hit servers such as Lyon's.
posted by Fergie @ 8/23/2005 05:08:00 AM
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