The Business of Malware

Information designer Jess Bachman's latest creation explores the "financial motivations and transaction that take place in the underground malware and trojan markets." The flow chart "follows the point of infection to monetary gain of the botmasters, scammers and fraudsters who operate these nefarious lines of code." View the full image.

Boing Boing editor/partner and tech culture journalist Xeni Jardin hosts and produces Boing Boing's in-flight TV channel on Virgin America airlines (#10 on the dial), and writes about living with breast cancer. Diagnosed in 2011. @xeni on Twitter. email: xeni@boingboing.net.

MORE: Art and Design • cybercrime • Ripoffs • Safety • security • Technology

More at Boing Boing

The technology that links taxonomy and Star Trek

Hackers prepare for first "national holiday" in their honor

OldRipbeak

Huh, I wonder why there is a price difference in zombies? I guess that’s why the first predictive search result in google to the phrase “why can” is “why can’t i own a canadian”. ;)
JeffersonJ

Seeing this just makes me even more pissed about the Gawker comments hacking. Hopefully they didn’t see my voter registration form in an 8-year-old email (and yes, I guess it’s my fault for not deleting it sooner).
- Antinous / Moderator
  
  Speaking of Gawker, if you need to change your BB password, there’s an edit button in the black box on the sidebar. It might take the system a little while to catch up with the change. Remember that you log in with your user name, not your display name or your e-mail.
HaltingPoint

Worth pointing out that Jess does these infographics for SEO. Very interesting when you dig into it actually.

Basically she creates an infographic and markets the hell out of it on social networking sites and blogs (like here). If you look at the domain the image is hosted on, it is computerschool.org and the “Add this infographic to your website” code at the very bottom contains a backlink to the site with the link text of “computer school.” This helps grow the targeted backlinks to the site and ultimately increases their rankings in search engines.

Typically these sites put fun general content up until they build enough backlinks up to rank well, and then they edit the site to slap up a lead-gen affiliate program form. In this instance it would be an edu lead-gen form for computer schools which I’m guessing pays anywhere from $5-$15 per submit depending on quality.

If you look at her website portfolio, she makes it very apparent that she is targeting her services to companies looking to develop backlinks for SEO, not really about the content itself (as shown by how random some of these things are in relation to the sites they are placed on).