Could Opera Unite Be a Botmasters Best Friend?
Opera has added a lot of cool new features to its upcoming Opera 10 browser, and one of them is almost sure to catch the eye of cyber criminals. It’s called Opera Unite, and while Opera promotes it as an exciting new platform for next-generation Web development, some security experts say it could become the botmaster’s best friend. Opera Unite lets anyone run a Web server from their desktop. The browser connects to an Opera proxy server, which then allows the browser to serve content to the rest of the Internet. This simplifies things for home users who want to host their own Web pages; with Opera’s architecture, they don’t have to configure firewalls or worry about their Internet service providers blocking Web server traffic. But it also makes a precious resource more readily available to the bad guys. In recent years, hacked Web sites have become the fastest-growing way for criminals to spread their malicious software. They have developed automated Web-hacking code, such as the recen
