"LXF: That seems to put the blame on the software vendors rather
than the hackers...
"RA: In the criminal underworld, there's a set of separate
economic forces that determine what the exploitation pattern will
look like. What, for example, are the economics of running a
botnet? Well, we know that when machines are captured, typically
hackers do such high-value exploits as they can -- keyloggers for
bank data, and that sort of thing -- and then they go down the food
chain. Compromised machines may end up being used to send spam, and
then once they're blacklisted by all the spam filters, they'll end
up being used for distributed denial-of-service attacks."
