Had a spam for an email address used only for Pixmania this morning. The email even had my real name, and a quick Google confirmed that Pixmania's (or whichever 3rd party handles their data) servers had been attacked and customer records stolen. Seems to be a regular event, and whats even more annoying, Pixmania haven't owned up, unlike Play or Trip Advisor when their servers were hacked.
Seems to be a lot of hacking stuff recently. Wonder if it's all the same group? If they're just out to prove a point with no criminal intent maybe some good will come out of it all. Or am I way off base?
No it's mostly the Chinese government, and bot masters, intent is to get good enough data to con people into accidental download of trojans that turn their PC into a drone on a specific botnet. These ro"bots" or drones (also known as zombies) have enormous computational power when used together and enormous potential to bring down other computers and systems via Denial of Service (DoS) attacks. A botnet can be used to create a network of spam sites, or clone sites that impersonate real sites by making them act as a web farm hosting multiple web servers on DNS hostnames that are very similar to real sites, thus trying to capture card data for fraud and other purposes. The owners of botnets make money just by renting them out to criminals that need the computing power! The value of capturing millions of user accounts is that by knowing your target audience well, then you have a better chance of tricking them into either accidentally giving away financial information or tricking them into turning their PC into a member of a botnet which can then be rented out to criminals. The crims will have many different agenda's which can be addressed by the computing power of a million PC network, some of these networks are bigger than that already and the bot software is smart enough to fight it out with rival bot code in order to "own" a node (machine or PC). The Chinese government uses the same tactics but for the purposes of attempting espionage both industrial and military. If you control a million PC's you can use them as a supercomputer to solve problems or you can use that capacity for evil intent and the owners are more than happy to rent them to the highest bidder.
