As criminals have woken up to the massive reach afforded to their activities thanks to the Internet, hackers too are now able to avoid risking prison sentences by simply selling on their findings. Graeme Pinkney, a manager at Symantec for trend analysis, told us: ‘People have suddenly realised that there’s now a profit margin and a revenue stream in vulnerabilities. Vulnerabilities are being turned up in web applications because that’s where hackers are looking for them. Some 80 per cent of the top 50 exploits analysed by Symantec turned out to be ‘revenue-written’, according to Pinkney. Distributed denial of service attacks rose 51 per cent over the six-months prior to 1,405 a day.