A question that we get asked regularly is “How do people make money from viruses?”. This is a topic that, for many, is hard to get their brain around. I’ve covered several ways to ‘monetize’ malware in the past but saw this article this morning and wanted to share it with a quick op-ed.
The article basically takes a look at malware designed to ‘steal’ money from advertisers by faking clicks (e.g., an advertiser pays to advertise on a page and is billed based on the number of people that ‘click’ on the advertising link). This is only one way that criminals have found to monetize malware but the article does an excellent job of demonstrating how it works.
The article also gives a good cross section of the malware that’s out there, listed according to it’s popularity and covers malware on both computers and mobile devices (your mobile phone).