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A common question people ask is "why do hackers want to hack me?"
It is not safe to assume that you have nothing of interest to a hacker. You may not have secret documents on your computer or even use a credit card online, but you do have something valuable; bandwidth.
Even dial up accounts are valuable to hackers. A hacker can steal the login details from a victim and use the victims account to hack other people. The victim will often get blamed for these attacks as they seemingly come from their computer.
Broadband technology has given hackers more scope when it comes to bandwidth theft. A hacker can set up an ftp server on an infected victims system and upload a heap of pirated software then publish the address around the internet. These warez dumps and pubstro's as they are known can cost a victim literally thousands of dollars in bandwidth.
Distributed denial of service attacks require the hacker to control a vast amount of machines. If the hacker has control of your machine, they can use it as a zombie to attack corporate sites and government computers. Victims can even be taken to court in some countries if they fail to provide security measures and their computer is used in an attack.
Hackers are also interested in credit card numbers and internet payment accounts such as paypal etc. Many warez groups will use a stolen credit card number to purchase software then distribute the stolen software key to others online. Trojan makers are slowly moving away from coding malware for free and are moving into the arena of making malware for profits.
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