New gang war raging on the Internet
It's like something out of the Sopranos. Antivirus researchers at Moscow-based Kaspersky Labs have identified criminal gangs engaged in a turf battle online. The primary groups are responsible for the Warezov and Zhelatin worms …
Context & Ripple Effects
Security reporting through early 2007 framed the botnet problem as a mass of anonymous 'zombie computers' — the New York Times flagged the growing threat of hijacked machines in January 2007 without naming who was behind them (Attack of the Zombie Computers Is a Growing Threat). What Kaspersky Labs adds here is attribution and structure: the Moscow-based researchers say identifiable criminal gangs, responsible respectively for the Warezov and Zhelatin worms, are actively fighting each other over territory.
That framing matters because it recasts malware from a nuisance written by individuals into a contested asset controlled by organized crews — the Sopranos comparison in CNET's own description signals that researchers see mob-style rivalry, not random vandalism, driving infection spreads.
First-order effects
- Users whose machines are caught between the two gangs face repeated re-infection, since each side's worm attempts to displace the other's foothold on the same host.
- Antivirus vendors led by Kaspersky Labs shift research effort from cataloguing individual worm variants to mapping which criminal organization controls which botnet.
Second-order effects
- Rivalry between the Warezov and Zhelatin crews forces both to iterate faster — new variants and stronger persistence mechanisms become competitive weapons rather than just evasion tools.
- Signature-only defenses at security firms come under strain as competing gangs push variant churn, pushing the industry toward behavioral detection approaches.
Third-order effects
- If turf wars over infected machines persist, malware authoring consolidates into a professionalized criminal economy where botnets function as revenue-bearing territory worth fighting over.
- Law enforcement and regulators confront an adversary structured like organized crime, raising pressure for cross-border cooperation against crews operating from jurisdictions like Russia.
The trend: Malware is shifting from hobbyist vandalism to organized-gang competition for control of botnet infrastructure, with security research following the money into criminal attribution.