The Symantec Security Response Weblog has an excellent post up today titled "Honor among thieves?" that talks about free versions of the now-infamous Mpack and IcePack exploit packages containing backdoors and additional redirects. They theorize that this is essentially the premium for getting the packs for free, which is very interesting. In essence, the malware gurus are using an ad revenue model to make money off the packs. This is kind of like the shift from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 in terms of moving away from relying on product sales to really leverage the long tail available to them. :)
Ok, so some of my thoughts here are tongue-in-cheek, but it's an interesting post nonetheless. Check it out! :)