Virus with SOCKS appeal targets corporate PCs
Sometime last year, the cat and mouse switched places on the Internet.
The hackers used to be the little guys, scampering around unleashing viruses and furtive attacks against Web sites. It was a nuisance, but big government and commercial sites generally could chase them away.
"We used to feel like the cat playing with the mouse," recalled Aristotle Balogh, senior vice president at VeriSign, a company that oversees some of the Internet's critical functions. "Now we feel more like the mouse, trying to be fast enough because the attackers are becoming much more like the cat."
Balogh provided a gloomy account of the hacker wars two weeks ago when I visited VeriSign's global network operations center in Dulles, Va. VeriSign considers 2004 "the turning point" in the conflict, Balogh explained, because the bad guys exhibited such dramatic leaps in creativity, sophistication and focus.
