14 DAY TRIAL // Hacking is one serious issue nowadays, as it is a both cheap and efficient weapon. Whiz kids with too much power have become a threat to many states' national security. What's even worse is the fact that the thing that ISPs fear most, botnets, is a really "trendy" thing amongst hackers.
As United Press International informs us, a former senior US information security official says that there are nearly three quarter million personal computers in the United Stated taken over by Chinese hackers. The number is huge and I guess that it's not something you wouldn't expect, since China has so many hackers and hosts so much malware. But things are far worse than this - the Chinese aren't the only ones controlling American computers and who knows how many victims the Storm virus has made?
Though it is hard for the average user to enslave a computer, it is not such a hard thing to do for a hacker. All he needs to do is get a virus creation toolkit form the web (some even say they've seen such things on eBay) create a Trojan bot for instance, and then infect machines with it. This might be a little tricky, as a spam campaign is required and an infected site will be needed as well. Basically, they need to convince gullible users to infect themselves in order for this to work. After a machine gets the virus, it become a slave, a zombie part of a botnet, under the hackers control and it is automatically spreading the virus even further.
However, about the Chinese hackers - as far as it is known they are in no way connected with the People's Liberation Army. Till now, no government has pointed their finger at the Chinese PLA for these crimes and officials from China have stated that they have nothing to do with any attacks, botnets and such things, but they are victims of hackers as well.