Malware and Capitalism

by Lineman

Does it seem like viruses, trojans, worms, and all of their ugly cousins are released more frequently, spread more easily, and do damage even more severe with each passing month? It's not just you and there's an explanation for this trend. What may surprise you is that it has nothing to do with Microsoft.

Some of us can still remember a time when running antiviral software was a luxury and spyware scanners weren't even a sparkle in any coder's eye. We would occasionally hear about some horrible virus on the way, but more often than not we'd end up with a simple hoax or at least an exaggeration.

Occasionally, a real threat would rear its head. When this happened, I'd always get the same question from the people I knew: why would anyone want to make a computer virus? My most likely answer was usually to get attention. Of course, my friends and I always had our pet theories about the antivirus companies being behind them. While I don't believe that to have ever been the case, I think we were on to something closer to the truth than we could possibly have realized at the time.

What our malformed impression about malware acknowledge was the possibility of money being a primary motivation in the writing of a virus. There were certainly the Hacker-esque ideas like viruses being used to blackmail large corporations or governments, but that was the extent of our speculations. Who could have imagined the eventual Web with all its revenue-generating angles? Each innovation potentially creates an incentive for malware to be written.

Whether one is in favor of capitalism or not, the fact that it results in more motivated workers is undeniable. Not that I'm implying that all the resulting work is legal, which leads me to my point. The reason why there is so much more malware both here and on the horizon is that it can draw cash in through legal mechanisms such as sales and advertising. The malware itself may (or may not) be illegal, but making a clear connection between it and its most likely source is nearly impossible with so many people down the line potentially benefiting from the end results. Something as simple as changing the start pages of a few thousand people or forcing frequent pop-ups on them could result in enough clicks (even by accident) to nicely supplement some jerk's income.

And if you think browser hijacking as we know it is bad, just wait for what is likely in store. Pop-ups are certainly blatant and obtrusive, but imagine something more subtle that embeds some sort of ad within the content of every site one visits. Tie that in with the context-based, intelligent advertising that's all the rage and the fact that ads are already everywhere and it could take years to track down or even notice something along these lines if coded particularly well. After all, the people who would be able to spot this type of malware probably wouldn't get it in the first place. Again nodding to capitalism, the possibility of such easy sources of income could lead to all sorts of innovations, legal or not, that we can't even comprehend.

Now you Linux, BSD, and MacOS users are probably still thinking this doesn't apply to you. Maybe not yet, but rest assured that your day is coming. There's just too much dirty money at stake for it not to happen. The reality is that if you want any of these operating systems to become mainstream (not that all of you do or that they necessarily should), then there will eventually be a balance struck between security and the ability of mortals to easily install new software. Once that happens, you'll be in the same boat as the rest of us.

I'd hate to end this examination of malware on such a negative note, so how about I give you the solution to all of it? Actually, I'll give you two. The good news is that either one will work. The bad news is we can only choose one and we can't hold back.

These solutions are just as tied to capitalism as the malware we loathe. The first is to remove the ability of your average Joe to make money on the Internet, effectively taking capitalism and free enterprise out of the equation. The second is to start finding ways to make the prevention of malware more lucrative than the proliferation of it. And for that matter, more lucrative than removing it.