Welcome To Cyber War

clipped from www.strategypage.com Computer network security personnel are encountering more and more ugly surprises when they take apart the hacker programs that are planted in PCs. These hacker "payloads" have become much more powerful over the last few years. Much like the AI (Artificial Intelligence) in computer games has become more realistic, so have the tools hackers build into their payloads. The most powerful of these new payloads still concentrate on the key objectives of  their kind; don't get caught, and steal something useful. But now they do so with much more powerful tools. The defensive abilities have multiplied to include the ability to detect the anti-virus defenses of the PC they have infected, and a wide range of tools to defeat anti-virus software. A few years back, a clever payload would simply shut off the anti-virus, but today, top-grade payloads modify the anti-virus system so that the user thinks the PC is still protected, when it isn't.