China becoming the world's malware factory

It's not a surprise to anyone already working in the security industry, but a lot of malware and viruses come from or are hosted in China. A new article in Network World this week highlighted this fact.

With China's economy cooling down, some of the country's IT professionals are turning to cybercrime, according to a Beijing-based security expert.

Speaking at the CanSecWest security conference last week, Wei Zhao, CEO of Knownsec, a Beijing security company, said that while many Chinese workers may be feeling hard times, business is still booming in the country's cybercrime industry. "As the stock market dropped like a stone, a lot of IT professionals lost lots of money on the stock market," he said. "So sometimes they sell 0days," he said, referring to previously unknown software bugs.

This increase in cybercrime should be a concern to any IT administrator. The job of security is difficult enough without the addition of more hackers intent on bringing malware to our end-users. And hackers are finding more ways to target end-users. Just look at this quote below from Network World.

Hackers have had a lot of success launching widespread 0 day attacks against programs like RealPlayer and Adobe Flash, but they have also hit local Chinese programs, including Xunlei, QQ and UUSee.

Need I say any more?