Research firm Gartner has concluded that the recent outbreak of wom variants were triggered by Russsian mobsters intent on extorting online gaming companies.
The recent spate of computer worms have included elements of spamming and a supposed battle of words between different malware authors, but the real intent of the dueling viruses is to deny site availability to online gaming companies and other sites that have not complied with Russian mobsters’ demands, Gartner research director Richard Stiennon told TechNewsWorld.
“The worm writers this time around are really cyber criminals in Russia,” Stiennon said of the Bagle, Netsky and MyDoom variants. “They’re using [the worms] to recruit bots (compromised computers) to launch denial-of-service attacks, mostly against online gaming sites, after failing to extort large payments from the sites.”
Read the full story at E-Commerce Times.
