The Mariposa botnet--thwarted with the help of --is a prime example of how effective and pervasive an attack can be using an attack toolkit. The leaders of the Mariposa botnet apparently had little, if any, actual programming knowledge.

Ori Eisen, CIO of , proclaims, "We are getting close to the point where all the planets align; where fraud makes the evolutionary leap from organic growth with limited success, to exponential growth with a much higher success rate because the barrier for entry is minimal, and these attacks are highly scalable."

Social Engineering Attacks

Some things never change, and one of them is that the person sitting at the keyboard is invariably the weakest link in the security chain. Another thing that will never change is that attackers will continue to recognize and exploit this fact to the best of their ability.

Rogue antivirus software has been --hard drive defrag utilities and general system performance tools--to lure naïve users into installing malicious software on their own PCs.