This thief has a very particular niche: your identity. A shape-shifter, a trickster, a master of disguise, the Identity theft bot is never who you think he – or she, or it – is until it's too late. After it breaks into an unsuspecting PC, it will steal personal and private information – passwords, credit card numbers, names, addresses, images – that will all be used to forge his next, new identity. Which could be yours...

Phishing is essentially an online con game and phishers are nothing more than tech-savvy con artists and identify thieves. They use SPAM, malicious Web sites, email messages and instant messages to trick people into divulging sensitive information, such as bank and credit card accounts.

A thug among thugs, DoS bots wreak their own distinct breed of havoc by launching denial – of – service attacks against target Web sites. Once an attack is launched and service is halted, sites conducting e–commerce can lose valuable business—thus the several instances in which unethical companies have hired hackers to use DoS bots to take down a competitor's site.