AVG finds 11 year-old creating malware to steal game passwords

[JMH]

Security firm AVG thinks it has spotted a disturbing new threat in its latest threat report – children with enough programming skills to code and distribute their own malware.

The company said it had recently reverse-engineered one piece of malware that turned out to be the handiwork of an 11 year-old Canadian boy intent on stealing passwords used to access games such as Team Fortress.

Although still exceptions to the rule, AVG is convinced this type of child coder is a real phenomenon, able to wield simple programming languages such as C# (C Sharp) and Visual Basic to carry out mostly attacks aimed at stealing game logins for major platforms such as Steam or manipulating individual games.

AVG finds 11 year-old creating malware to steal game passwords - Techworld.com

 

[AceInfinity]

Haha, this is absolutely no surprise to me. Back when I was programming at that age, even if it was just for jokes, out of curiosity it was fun, even for batch scripts, to make a cool terminal with green text do something. Programming is just programming, creating malware would not be that hard, especially since knowledge about malware is everywhere today :lol:. Forums, articles, blogs, books, people... They all are culprits at explaining new threats to consumers, but to a programmer reading or hearing something like that, it's like a written up "guide" or a "how-to" *chuckles*, which is something that most people do not get, unless they are a programmer themselves.

We are the only ones at fault for people like this out there today, thus we are, ourselves, to blame.

For instance, if I read an article today, on a piece of malware that say, breached the military of defense, and got into the predator drone system via some open port that allowed me to do something freely through there (for lack of a full detailed explanation of why this would be a threat). A hacker would realize this, and start port scanning to find out vulnerabilities that way. Although something that simple would probably be fixed within minutes of discovery, it's no different for anything else in the world of computers. Analysis and pieces of writing that portray any kind of analysis on something, GIVE information away to the reader.

When you read an article or a book, you don't walk away without saying you have learned something, you learn something whether you realize it or not. If it weren't for all of this information already available on the net, we probably would have less malware today, because it would be harder for people to figure out how it all works, without some kind of "stable ground" for learning the basics first.

So... This helps "hackers" and it helps as well, people, to prevent against the kinds of things hackers would do to try and gain the advantage over some kind of "security". Because it's this good vs. evil kind of thing all the time though, it's a never ending battle, because both sides progress their knowledge in this kind of field. Whether it's from something a hacker has done, you learn something from that attack, or whether you figure it out on your own. Think of it as a sword fight. If your opponent tries a new move on you, and nicks you, yeah perhaps it hurt, but you learned the way your opponent fights that much more from before he/she struck you.