Elonka wrote:
] Speculation that the Sobig worm wasn't created by a kiddie or
] someone trying to make a point about security or even by a
] group of spammers, but by a much darker shade of black hat . .
]

Hrm... Sounds like a lot of arm chair sleuthing from IT people who don't actually investigate crimes. Theories are just that until there is some solid data. This is some lame security people and some lame reporters looking for attention. Having said that, I'll go ahead and speculate anyway.

The term "organized crime" is extremely misleading. People think of italians cutting people up in a garage, but it really means any group of 2 or more people who commit a crime. The same laws apply to hacker crews. These people may be a "hacker crew" and may in fact even be in it for the money and still not be the kind of gang that kills people and has bosses.

This kind of network is not really useful for spamming. There are easier ways to amplify spam, and spam is easy to trace. I agree with the commentator in the article that said this is too high profile for such an activity.

This network is useful for distributed computing and distributed denial of service attacks. I've seen (and responded to) DOS attacks that were launched for financial purposes. I'm sure there are international groups that sell such services. I also would not be surprised to find someone trying to crack a critical key for financial reasons. I've never seen that though.

Trouble with these theories are:

We are going to know exactly what the network is being used for when it starts, because there are computers in the network that are intentionally being put there by security people.

These kinds of crimes are more common in places where the police are incompetent. Doing something like this using American computers is extremely stupid. Once you employ it for something, you provide motive. Motive will lead to suspects. Suspects lead to convictions.