Rival criminals gangs on the net, sabotaging each other.
On the bright side, no one is being shot gangland style, which implies, contrary to the hype that the Russian Mafia, the Cali Drug Cartel, and al Queida are not involved.
Additionally, any effort spent going after each other is time NOT spent going after us.
This is the real second life.
Rival malware gangs wage turf war
By Dan Goodin in San Francisco
Published Sunday 1st July 2007 07:02 GMTSecurity researchers have uncovered evidence of a turf war between rival criminal enterprises connected to two of the most sophisticated malware toolkits in current use.
Like competing gangs in the Mafia – for those who followed the HBO series The Sopranos, think the New York-based Lupertazzi crime family and its sometimes enemy the DiMeo crime family, which Tony Soprano ran from New Jersey – the malware groups are fighting for turf and control.
But rather than clashing over who gets to skim money off a garbage collection contract or a major construction project, the cyber criminals are battling to own tens of thousands of compromised computers.
Enter the propagators of a piece of malware Symantec dubs Trojan.Srizbi (http://www.symantec.com/security_response/writeup.jsp?docid=2007-062007-0946-99&tabid=1), one of a handful programs spread by the MPack attack kit (http://www.theregister.com/2007/06/18/hijacked_sites_install_malware/). A trojan that makes infected computers part of a botnet that churns out spam, Srizbi is also known to uninstall competing spam malware being spread by another nasty piece of malware dubbed the Storm Worm.
“The Storm Worm criminals appear to have taken exception to that,” says Lawrence Baldwin, a malware researcher who has recently observed Storm zombies DDoSing the server Srizbi uses to download installation files. Baldwin is unable to estimate how much traffic the Storm bots are sending to the Srizbi server, but he says attempts to get an infected machine in his lab to update the Storm malware makes him believe the attack is significant.
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