Virus writers in the wild
The University of Calgary is getting a lot of attention these days. The school is offering a course on how to write computer viruses and malware. Story after story has been published in recent days about the pros and cons on the ethics and wisdom of teaching young people how to write malicious code. Chat boards have been alive with reader responses, and in some cases, a little name-calling has erupted. "You're stupid!" "No, you're stupid!" "You're stupider!"
The antivirus software developers, for the most part, are up in arms about the audacity of a university teaching people how to write harmful code. The CEO of Sophos even stated that his company would never hire anyone who had written virus code.
The raging debate seems to be evenly divided between those who are against teaching such skills in school and those who think learning to write the code, contain it and kill it is a valuable skill.
Gigabyte, a 19-year-old woman from Belgium and a somewhat infamous virus writer, wrote what's believed to be the first virus using Microsoft's C# programming language. I had the opportunity to communicate with Gigabyte via e-mail, and here is what she said:
