Phat-Poly, the puppet master

According to a recent article in The New York Times, a new menace has surfaced for Internet users; a potentially PHAT (Pretty Hateful and Treacherous) menace at that.

“The [menace], known as phatbot or polybot, uses technology like that developed for file sharing networks such as Gnutella and Kazaa to control the machines … Once the program has made its way onto a victim’s computer, it spreads across networks and searches for paswords that are stored on hard drives and are passing across local networks. It also disables antivirus programs and systems for upgrading software security.”

Spybots and Adware programs are nothing new to the Internet. Often they are used to communicate with servers and spawn annoying Browser Hijacks and pop-up windows based on the server they communicate with and sites the infected computer visits. However, the way Phatbot propogates is typically that of a worm virus, which tends more often to be grounded in email programs, sending to the entries of the address book.

The prominent question, then, is who created this program, and why?

There is a long-standing, unproven conspiracy theory that has floated around the Internet since the development of the first antivirus software, in which theorists speculate that the parties responsible for designing computer virii are not malicious coders out to infect people, but rather the developers of the antivirus software themselves, creating their own sales.

Of course, adware and spyware are often removeable by several free removal programs, or can be stopped from communicating with their target servers by denying their access to pass through a firewall. It seems rather interesting that, in a time where industries are taking a much harder stance on software, music, and movie piracy, bots would be programmed to propogate throughout the Internet via the very tools that people utilize to pirate these materials and transfer them among their peers. Even more interesting may be the fact that Phatbot is said to propogate in the manner of a worm virus, while pay-for-download sites such as “Puretracks” publish warnings about the viruses, pop-ups and spam that users get barraged with by using download sites and peer-to-peer networks.

Perhaps another shot in the attempted war against online piracy?