What Hacked PC’s Do
You may think that only people with banking or credit card information connected with their computers will be attacked, that maybe the bad guys only steal money, but it’s much, much, worse. Once a dubious character has control of your system, what they may want to do goes beyond only doing something slightly unpleasant like stealing money. A blog post over on Security Fix at the Washington Post details the some reasons for a criminal to take over computers.
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Hosting dubious enterprises:
in order to power anything from spam and phishing to pirated media and malware computers are needed to “host” files on the web. Why would someone ever endanger their own computer and internet connection with something like that? Instead, they take over someone else’s computer to do the grunt work.
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Mindless Labor as a Zombie:
In fact, why even give a stolen computer such an important task as web hosting? Let it do some lowly task, along with hundreds or thousands of it’s kind. These computers are part of botnets, and are called zombies. They are commanded to provide processing power for some vast task, such as breaking captchas, sending spam, or even relaying the internet communications of hackers as a proxy. Maybe they even force websites to pay so that they are not shut down by a Denial of Service attack by the entire botnet.
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Harvesting for Spam:
Just the contacts of an email account can yield many email addresses to add to a spam list. In fact, why bother with the computer at all? Just a compromised account can wreak havoc, begging friends and contacts for money. In fact, just knowing a password can easily open up all the other accounts that have the same password (which is common) or reset the passwords of accounts via the email address.
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Stolen Credentials:
User names passwords, etc. Each giving the hacker access to some part of the victims online life. A website can be taken over, to host all sorts of nasties (see first point.) Any web pages those accounts control are an advantage.
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Virtual Goods:
Why only steal definite things? Stealing gaming accounts is an active business, and the objects filched off those account are valuable. Often the worth of a player is tied to the account, and simply possessing it is an advantage in the game.
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Financial Credentials:
Well, of course these are stolen, but they are only the tip of the iceberg.
