Fascinating figures out last week showing that Russia had eclipsed China as the world's biggest producer of malware. The US comes in at number three.

As Joe Telafici writes in this latest McAfee newsletter , malware has become more regional because of better social engineering which means you need native speakers crafting country-, language-, company-, and software-specific attacks. As well as that there are now more vulnerabilities found in more obscure software and there is a growing tendency for malware authors to focus their efforts on places with lax law enforcement and on niche markets.

As a result, we are now seeing advertisements for virus authors fluent in languages from Japanese to Portugese showing up online. This is being driven by economic conditions in nations like China and Russia where there is a surplus of skilled coders who lack regular work, or possibly any work at all and slack laws, says Joel Hruska at ars technica.

All of which has resulted in a fascinating trend of a full-blown service economy that's aimed not at stealing but at helping others to steal. And enabling online crime pays better than perpetrating it when you add up the risk of apprehension, prosecution and incarceration.

The biggest factor driving the emergence of this new service economy is the obvious one: an explosion of online banking and shopping, coupled with consumers' increasing willingness to disclose personal information over the Internet. For those with the technical skills, opportunities for exploitation are richer than ever before," writes Scott Berinato in the Harvard Business Review.

"But something else is happening, too," Berinato writes. "Those gifted hackers are now enabling the far larger market of wannabes whose deficient skills would otherwise shut them out of the cybercriminal enterprise system. By creating services for those people, hackers can generate huge profits without actually committing fraud. Gold prospectors may or may not strike it rich, but folks selling pans and pickaxes make a heck of a living either way."