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Have you ever wondered where all the computer viruses have gone?

In the late 1990s and early in this decade, major outbreaks made big headlines. But lately, we haven't seen a major outbreak — one that's front-page worthy — because viruses have gone underground for one very good reason: they make money.

I tell you how in a minute. First, let's look at a bit of history.

When broadband Internet connections started appealing to the mass market in the late 1990s, conditions became ripe for exploitation. Consumers connected affordable computers to very fast, always-on Internet connections. And better, they were naive.

In 1999, the Melissa worm, named after an exotic dancer with whom it's author was obsessed, tore across the Internet as an email attachment. A worm is a virus that travels on a network without human help.

In 2003, the Lovesan worm (also known as Blaster) using macro technology in Windows Word to spread across the Internet in just two days, picking up momentum as it went. Its objective was to infect personal computers and harness them to bombard Microsoft's Windows Update servers with millions of bullets of data.

Then the pernicious and virulent digital infections seemingly stopped. Or at least there were no more headlines proclaiming outbreaks — not compared to what had come before.

What happened? Viruses went underground.

Ego-gratification was the major driver for virus writers early in the decade. But someone somewhere recognized that there was utility in infecting Net-connected computers and keeping the infections secret. A hidden virus, you see, is a money-making tool.

Malware programmers realized their worms could be drones that could penetrate a computer's defences and then install a "bot", an automated program that could open up a communications channel back to the mother ship somewhere on the Internet, and wait for a command.

Commanded to act all at once, this botnet, as a network of bot-infected machines are called, can be a powerful revenue tool.

One of most effective uses for botnets is for spam distribution.

Sending massive amounts of commercial email is a numbers game. If spammer sends an ad to 1 million unsolicited emails, one in a thousand is clicked. Beyond spam that sells pornography and medication (like Viagra); the third most successful type of spam advertises Rolex watches. According to CipherTrust, 0.0075 percent of those promotions get clicked on. A spammer can become very rich very quickly.

Botnets are extremely effective because it's very hard to shutdown the source of spam if it coming from thousands of infected but otherwise innocent personal computers.

Botnets are also use to extort large companies. Bots can be remotely triggered to send repeated packets of data at a target computer. A rock thrown at a mailbox might create a ding, but a dump truck of rocks will flatten it. A botnet made up of hundreds of thousands of computers can deliver that hail of data.

The other malware revenue driver is identity theft, the fastest growing crime on the Internet. It is fast becoming one of the key uses for malware on the Internet. Snooper software can be used to capture personal data and transmit it back home. Technically this malware technique draws from virus , worm and spyware technology . A virus or worm is used to penetrate a computer and then a bot may download further spyware tools to collect identity information from its host computer and send it home to its creator.

Malware writers now use virus technology combined a root kit (a concealment program that hides the presence of a virus from anti-virus programs) to infect a machine. This bot can be used to deploy spyware programming. This snoop software includes keyloggers which watch and record keystrokes as well s other data collection tools.

The eco-system that supports identity theft is highly organized. Freelance malware programmers use their tools to steal your personal information from your computer and then they sell it to a criminals that exploit the data, accessing perhaps your online bank account and cleaning it out.

"It is no longer a cottage industry. It is funded by crime rings," explains security expert Ron Nguyen, Director of Consulting at FoundStone, a division of McAfee.

Malware has become an extremely effective method of stealing data, said Nguyen. So the crime rings have an inventory problem. "There's a glut of stolen identities. So if yours is stolen it may not get used for six to nine months down the road."

The freelancer receives a fee for each identity they hand over. How much? In the dark economy of identity theft, you are worth a buck.