• MSNBC.com , Wednesday, March 28, 2007 12:30 PM

In a special report, MSNBC´s Bob Sullivan concludes that it´s highly possible your computer is under the control of a hacker, who like the proverbial pied piper, can organize legions of computers to perform tasks for him. Experts tell him the Web has become an "operating system for criminals"; viruses that create bot networks have become so lucrative that hackers now are locked in a cyber arms race with security companies.

Hackers lease out their bot networks to criminals who may want to send spam, launch a denial of service attack on a bank for randsom, or even manipulate the stock market. For the latter, a new method is image spam, where a virus shows a stock symbol as being higher or lower to users of infected computers. In an email to MSNBC, one hacker boasted that he could double a stock price in two weeks.

Viruses still find their way onto computers through virus-laden emails, but newer techniques are so subtle that you´d never know whether your computer is infected. Earlier in the year, Vint Cerf, one of the founding fathers of the Internet, suggested that more than 150 million computers worldwide had been infected by criminals. Experts fear the actual number is even higher, and growing.

Read the whole story at MSNBC.com »