Where have virus writers gone ?
Mary Landesman, a security researcher who now works at Cisco, has tracked cybercrime from its early days, when virus writers showed off their wares on message boards and hackers defaced porn sites for fun. In December 2000, Ms. Landesman saw a lament: A virus writer wondered on a message board where her fellow virus writers had gone. Ms. Landesman took it as a harbinger of the danger ahead: The virus writers had begun to work for people who could pay them, and they kept quiet.
Anonymous rewrote the hacktivist playbook. It began to challenge a far broader political and economic order. "This really is cyberwar, and I don't use that term in a sensational way," said Richard Power, who chronicled the cybercrime of the 1990s in his book "Tangled Web." "You're looking at not just one particular cause. You're attacking the whole power structure. It involves some core critique."