Chapter 4 - Real Spyware—Crime, Economic Espionage, and Espionage

Abstract

This chapter examines the darkest side of spyware—that is, spyware in the hands of criminals, corporate espionage agents, and government espionage agents. Early hacking was mostly harmless and included things such as ASCII Christmas trees, funny messages, practical jokes, and, later, hacked Web pages. Over the past decade, more malevolent code has emerged in the form of worms, Denial of Service (DOS) attacks, and Distributed DOS attacks. A few individuals used their skills for their own benefit, but most individuals still followed the “Hacker ethic.” More recently, organized crime and unscrupulous marketing companies have generated lucrative markets for various schemes for generating revenue through hacking. These schemes include ransomware, theft of financial account information, identity theft, and storage of illegal files. To this list, governments and global corporation have added intelligence gathering, economic or industrial espionage, and information warfare. Phishing is multimedia spyware and botnet is a highly distributed spyware, and both these spyware differ from most spyware in that they can be targeted.