Even the black market, illegal as it is, has to bow down to the fundamentals of market economics sooner or later. Security authorities are now claiming that the price for cyber crime perks like DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks has dropped significantly a few months ago because the entry barriers to that questionable marketplace have become so low that competitors are now flooding that particular business front.

Jose Nazario—one of Arbor Networks' many security researchers—claim that cyber criminal syndicates are presently differentiating themselves from other online outlaws of their ilk by lowering their cost ($100 bargain-basement prices for 100-400 megabytes/second DDoS attacks that can go as low as about $30 to $60 on some Russian forums). Affordability is now the order of the day. Virtual terrorists have become veritable maestros in the art of breaching unsuspecting user PCs and merging their computing power together into nigh-unstoppable botnet networks that can be controlled remotely.

These inexorable botnets are then used to perpetuate the malware cycle by launching DDoS attacks (which taxes the server limits of a victim's system with unwanted traffic), pilfering passwords or other credentials, and sending loads and loads of spam emails. Nowadays, these malevolent botnets are rented out as illegal software-as-a-service packages to third parties that are usually found in online discussion boards.

DDoS attacks are a formidable type of online hazard because it has been known to wipe out online competitors, take down rivals, censor critics, and even extort money from legitimate business organizations. It is cyber terrorism in every sense of the word, as can be seen with the well-publicized DDoS attack that targeted both South Korean and U.S. servers and knocked down several websites offline.

Could the current economic crisis have anything to do with the fact that botnet operators are slashing the prices of their dubious services? Are they now cutting costs to survive these perilous times? Security experts don't have any concrete evidence at hand to prove that the financial meltdown has anything to do with the cyber assault "business", but they do take note that the number of infected computers have been rising as of late. In fact, there is an average of seventy-five thousand active botnet-based infections per day in 2008, which was a 31% increase from 2007.