Hacking

A worm that infects and backdoors a couple thousand hosts is a great way to quickly and easily obtain data from those systems. Examples of data that may be worth stealing includes accounts for online games, credit card numbers, personal information that can be used in identity theft scams, and more. There has even been a report that items of online games were being stolen to sell those later on E-bay. Already having compromised one machine, enhancing the influence into some network can be much easier of course. Take for example the case of a heavily firewalled company. A hacker can't get inside using an active approach, but notices that one of his malware serving websites infected a host within that network. Using a connect-back approach, where the infected node connects to the attacker, a can tunnel can be built through the firewall thereby allowing the attacker to reach the internal network.