D. Glenn Arthur Jr. wrote: Another interesting post, comments interspaced:
> Malcolm Smith wrote: > > There is a mindset for the creation of viruses, that I just don't > > understand. I can't understand vandalism either, wanton > destruction of > > public and/or private property for no purpose makes no sense to me. > > I understand *part* of it. I understand the "I wonder whether > it's possible to...?" part. I understand the math-cool and > SF-cool aspects of self-propogating code. But the "is it possible?" > question was answered long ago, I don't understand the desire to > have these things do damage, and an awful lot of them are written > using "virus construction kits" or by slightly modifying someone > else's virus, suggesting that the only really interesting parts > of the matter are not what motivate the people writing most of > them. I can certainly understand the need to try and break code by the developers of such code - hopefully on an internal network, as part of the development process, keeping such programmes or O/Ss one ahead of those of a malicious nature. I see those caught on television for causing damage and/or creating viruses and think what a waste of talent and how they could well have been using such knowledge for good uses and probably a very nice salary too. > Email address harvesters are icky but make economic sense. > Password stealers are icky but make power-trip sense. Credit > card stealers are icky but make criminal sense. Zombie installers > are icky but sort of make sense *if* you assume that whatever > the controller wants to use the zombies for makes any sense > (but unless they're used as spam remailers, zombies are usually > used to do more vandalism elsewhere, such as launching a DDoS > attack, which brings us back to the "I don't understand vandalism" > problem). Again, this is a mindset I don't understand, but sadly accept it is part of life. > Pointless destruction of information, causing random grief to > strangers, and DoS-ing the entire net or popular important > sites (thus making the net work less well for the attacker as > well as for all the victims) make no sense to me at all. I used to work for a company where a good 35-40% of budget was spent on repairing damage to infrastructure, where a good 90% of that was through vandalism, rather than accident/collision. What an incredible waste. Think what the money could have been used for over the years. I dread to think how much time and money is wasted due to man made computer problems, which, at the end of the day is passed on to the consumer of whatever the product is... Malcolm
