Here is an excerpt from an article published by the The Economist on April 24th.

"It was bound to happen. One after another, pieces of software have been moving online in a trend towards “software as a service” (SaaS). You can now manage your e-mail, write documents and edit spreadsheets using online services that run inside a web browser .... But now the trend has reached the darker corners of the software universe. Computer-security firms say criminals have adopted the new model too, and are offering “crimeware as a service” (CaaS).

.... 

The new offerings ... take commercialisation to the next level by allowing criminals to use and pay for such nefarious services via a web browser. Just as companies that adopt SaaS no longer need armies of support technicians ... criminals using CaaS no longer need to be hackers. One web-based service he found even allows customers to specify a target group, such as British lawyers or American doctors. Once enough of their machines have been infected, documents and other data are siphoned out of them."

 SaaS provides huge, potential benefits in terms of costs, business efficiencies and customer convenience. It will be the preferred tool of the emerging Semantic Web. The challenge is that it comes with fear factors, too. In Portability, Traceability and Data Ownership I have addressed some of those fear factors.

"The value proposition of data ownership is that it provides the most acceptable technological and socio-political pathway for adoption by ordinary people of the emerging Semantic Web."

For the complete Economist article, go to Pain in the aaS (sic).