Drive By Hacking

Hackers are always coming up with new attack vectors through which to infect and "own" computers. In the old days, the targets were often specific hosts with the intent to glean information or cause a service disruption. Nowadays, botnet herding pays the bills by selling chunks of the botnet for DDoS attacks, spam remailing or whatever purposes the buyer can think of. But to amass a large botnet requires infecting entire swaths of the Internet's hosts.

The old technique involved the mass e-mailing of users to lure them onto malicious websites masquerading as the real thing. The malicious sites would either infect the user through browser vulnerabilities or phish information from them. A newer technique involves the mass infection of legitimate websites either through cross-site scripting or an as yet undetermined vulnerability in the apache web server. Users now receive the same malicious code from real sites or have their personal information captured. Additionally, war-driving has taken a turn for evil where instead of simply logging open networks, hackers are intentionally reprogramming unsecured wireless routers to resolve addresses to hacked DNS servers, intentionally directing the unwitting directly into the hacker's hands.