The Washington Post has a big piece today about the sort of people who hijack PCs, form botnets, and make money from popups or even, sometimes, blackmail. For example, one 21-year old interviewed -- "0x80" (pronounced X-eighty) -- is making about $6,800 a month. He says:
"All those people in my botnet, right, if I don't use them, they're just gonna eventually get caught up in someone else's net, so it might as well be mine," 0x80 says. "I mean, most of these people I infect are so stupid they really ain't got no business being on [the Internet] in the first place."
One of 0x80's friends, Majy, says TopConverting "paid him an average of $2,400 every two weeks for installing its programs. He got 20 cents per install for computers in the United States and five cents per install for PCs in 16 other countries, including France, Germany and the United Kingdom. A nickel per install doesn't sound like much, unless you control a botnet of tens of thousands of computers."
Comment: If you've ever had to spend a couple of hours cleaning the spyware off someone's PC, look on the bright side: somewhere some useless, inadequately-socialised scum-brained jerk may have made 5c out of it.
