The new 'hacking'

There was a time when the point of hacking for "bright teens" was just to prove that they could indeed hack their way in. Now it seems to be making money, the Christian Science Monitor suggests. Hackers "rent" the networks of computers they've taken over with Trojan viruses to spammers (the networks are shrinking and getting more valuable as people get smarter and protect their PCs). "That's a major reason that turf wars are emerging among hackers. Besides infiltrating computer systems, the viruses are now also designed to kill any other competing viruses in those systems," according to the Monitor, in an article that sheds unusual light on this murky scene. Last week's brief "epidemic" among media organizations (see "PC 'virus season' starts") was short-lived but scary to computer security professionals because of how fast the viruses went out after the vulnerability was discovered.