The Dull Roar of Spyware

"Companies need to be every bit as vicious and malicious toward the people creating the attacks, and those paying them to do so, as the attackers themselves have been," said Boyd. "
We need to punish the affiliates, and anyone the [malware writers] do business with, and try to trace the money trail and shut these people down."

Yep, that was me.

You can see more thoughts on the current state of Spyware by checking out this kickass article over at Eweek. Ben Edelman, Richard Stiennon and Gartner also contribute. The basic thought seems to be that, regardless of the "sky is falling" rhetoric you'll often hear wheeled out, in actual fact, a lot of the most common (and successful) attacks around at the moment are just rehashes of older exploits. Whether IM Rootkits, Safety Browsers or Worms skimming around Orkut, the song remains the same. Take something old, rejiggify it and hurl it back to the general public. Add to that good old social engineering and you have quite a potent mixture. I also particularly enjoy how my notable quotable on Page 2 sounds like I'm calling for the bad guys to have their legs broken.

Awesome!