A botnet trading platform on which compromised PCs are bought and sold for profit has been uncovered.

In news that could concern those looking into IT data protection, Finjan's Malicious Code Research Center has looked into the operations of the Golden Cash network.

It consists of an entire trading platform of malware-infected PCs and uses all necessary components, including attack toolkits as well as buyer side and seller side.

The discovery is featured in Finjan's Cybercrime Intelligence Report of 2009, which has also revealed that batches of 1,000 malware-infected PCs can be bought for between $5 and $100 on the Golden Cash network.

"As reported by Finjan before, cybercriminals keep on looking for improved methods to generate profit," commented Yuval Ben-Itzhak, chief technology officer of Finjan.

BitDefender recently revealed a list of the top ten e-threats uncovered last month, with the autorun.inf exploitation code in first place, followed by Trojan.Clicker.CM.

A recent Connect survey found that the two major concerns about outsourcing services like IT support were 'loss of control' (56 per cent) and 'budget over-runs' (43 per cent).