Security and Your Mother's Linux Box

"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."

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