Why Do People Write Malware?

There are several reasons people are believed to write viruses and other malware. Traditionally viruses were written for peer recognition. More recently the reasons are profit driven.

    "But for the viruses there would be no spam. That's why we see ever more virulent viruses." -- Ed Gibson, FBI, at the Computer and Internet Crime Conference in London, Jan 2005 (source)

The majority of today's viruses, adware, spyware, and other malware are written to support advertising. There are two revenue sources. The first is from advertisers, people or companies that pay to have their advertising displayed by adware programs or distributed by spam. The second is from buyers, people who respond to the advertising.

Many of todays viruses are created to open a backdoor on infected computer. That backdoor is used to take control of the infected computer and use it as a "spam zombie" to send advertising e-mail.

Some spyware has another purpose: to spy on you. This software includes programs that record what you type, especially on secure web forms, looking for bank account and credit card numbers -- information that can be used or sold for identity theft crimes.