Bad month for malware authors

They say bad news comes in threes, and it would seem virus writers are the ones getting the bad news right now.

In the last month we’ve seen arrests and a conviction related to two malware families, Downloader-AAP and W32/Fujacks. Now there’s been an arrest and indictment of an alleged botmaster, related to the DDoS attack on CastleCops. Certainly not such smooth sailing for malware authors these days!

On the other hand, it does seem that cybercrime is still pretty lucrative, as long as you don’t mind being incarcerated or monitored by government agencies for a while. The Fujacks author apparently has a very lucrative job waiting for him when he finishes his sentence, and three men who were recently fined by the FTC for surreptitiously distributing adware, will apparently be keeping $3.2 million in profits from their underhanded activities.

While we haven’t won the war against malware authors by a long shot, it certainly seems that a few big battles have been won recently. Hopefully this trend will continue, and being a malware author will become more and more risky and less lucrative.