The Above Graphic and the information in this post come from Krebsonsecurity.com.
We get asked an awful lot why? why? do these guys do this. And over the years. My answer has changed. Back in the early 1990's I would say well they are just having fun at our expense they get a kick out of messing with people and they are smart enough to do it so they do. By the Late 1990's my answer started to change as it became apparent these guys were trying to get information from people or to use their computer for continued nefarious activity. By the Dawn of the New Millennium in 2001 It was clear that the bad guys were after information, or just wanted to use the hardware for purposes such as sending out spam email, hosted child pornography, breaking into Facebook accounts, iTunes accounts, skype accounts ebay accounts credit card accounts the list goes on and on and frankly on.
So now you know some of the reasons why they want into your crapy old computer even if you don't have anything important on it, the bad guys want to use its processor and your internet connection. There are litterally market places out there where you can purchase processing power from bot nets, of infected computers, or even run programs that just run on these botnets with very little skill on the side of the hacker themselves.
For more information on this please read the article posed at Krebsonsecurity.com
