Virus gang warfare on the Net

There might be a gang fight raging in your bedroom or study right
now. There's no gunfire, no blood, and you won’t smell any smoke. But
there is a battle. The fight is over your bandwidth and your PC
processing power.

Last week, we told you that perhaps as many
as 150 million computers connected to the Internet have been hijacked
by hackers who use them in high-stakes, big-ticket crimes. Hacker gangs
with creepy names like Rustock and Warezov order the armies of infected
computers – called bots -- to send out spam or attack Web sites for
profit.

They also use these armies to attack each other.

For
years, hackers have created specially-crafted malicious programs called
viruses and Trojan horses that sneak onto home computers through e-mail
attachments or infected Web pages. Once there, the program turns the
computer into a secret soldier in an army of hijacked machines that the
hacker -- now called a bot-herder -- can use to send out billions of
spam messages or to overwhelm Web sites with extraneous traffic. But
lately, a sharp rise in the number of infected computers has security
experts calling the attack an Internet epidemic.

The bot network
industry has become so profitable, and hijacked computers so valuable,
that rival gangs are now fighting over them. This digital gang warfare
is not