One very illegal summer job

Unbeknownst to countless families around the world, groups of teenage malicious hackers are renting out zombie family PCs to "spammers, fraudsters, and digital saboteurs," Reuters reports. "Zombie PCs?" you might ask. They're regular old Net-connected home computers that have been infected by "trojan" worms and viruses that allow the virus writers to control the infected PCs. "The result is a powerful network of zombie PCs that security experts call a 'botnet'," according to Reuters. Scotland Yard's computer crime unit told Reuters these botnets are networks of as many as 10,000-30,000 computers that small groups of young people, probably working out of their bedrooms, are renting to anybody for as little as $100 an hour. Consequently, "there may be millions of such PCs around the world doing the bidding of crime gangs," say computer security experts who believe the gangs are using these kids as child labor - a new, technically sophisticated form of it. As for the botnets they've developed, experts are worried the people who manipulate them will move beyond mere spamming to taking down key data networks and major Web sites.