Recently, the police department in Quebec, Canada, busted an international hacking network. 16 people that were between the ages of 17 and 26 were arrested and this was the biggest hacking scam in Canadian history according to the police. These hackers collaborated online to attack and took control about one millions computer all over the world that didn’t have firewall or anti-virus software. Because of that, they injected Trojans or worms in those computers. The investigators mentioned that the hackers profited about 45 million dollars.
The reason this happened was because there are many people who are not aware of the assets they would lose without the proper protections. If everyone knew how to prevent these kinds of attacks by adversaries, then these hackers wouldn’t have been able to take over this many computers. Another possibility is if each country has some type of entry points and setup firewalls and antivirus software there, we can prevent hackers attacking computers in other countries. Even though technology has advanced so much, it still seems that there’s still a great number of people who are not aware of the consequences when they leave their computers unprotected. I believe in order to fix this problem, we need to use various medias to help everyone to increase the awareness of these types of crimes.
Original post: http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2008/02/20/qc-hackers0220.html
Here’s the only article I’ve seen thus far – it makes no mention of the amount of money they made. Do you have the original post? Anyway, 45 million / 16 people is quite a lot. Some in the group face up to 10 years in prison.
http://ca.rss.news.yahoo.com/s/capress/080220/technology/technology_crime_hackers_1
My bad. I have included the link to the bottom of my post now :).