Mariposa could have been and had the potential to crash huge networks and huge web sites – this includes important Government sites, and if it didn’t destroy them it could have simply crashed them … the virus had infected 13 million computers and that’s massive, the trio had control over these 13 million computers and could track the financial details of all those who were infected. The Mariposa infected a vulnerabilty in internet explorer.
The police in Spain have come out all smug and said that the cyber geeks were stupid and criminally incompetent – they say thank god for that, as they didn’t realize the power that they had on their hands and the sheer power that they had at their disposal.
Picture this 13 million computers in your control and at any one time you could hit any website that you wanted, now there’s only a handful of sites that could cope with such a instant hit … would be devastating to the majority of sites out there. The poilce have labeled this as one of the biggest online threats and crimes – potentially – ever online.
