Malware groups Mimic Open Source communities

With many malware gangs crossing national borders and hitting international headlines, the marketplace for these illegal incidents is quickly becoming one like an open source community.

This is according to Thomas Holt, a professor criminal justice at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, who said rootkits, Trojans and other software bugs are looking like open source communities in that they can use one another's code to add new features and fix flaws.

Mr Holt and a team of researchers have been looking through websites, internet relay channels and other online forums where malware is discussed to find just what makes it so advantageous to communicate across the world with hackers.

They found that the distribution of Try2DDoS, a tool that automates distributed denial of service attacks was first released in June 2005 out of France and in the next two years a program with the same name showed up in China, Guatemala, Russia and Argentina.

Crime groups "are looking to one another for assistance," Mr Holt explained.

"It's no longer just a single person distributing malware. Now there appear to be groups and there appears to be a distribution of labor."