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Canadian University to Begin Training Hackers

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the learning-from-the-other-side dept.

torok writes "According to an article at The Edmonton Journal, The University of Calgary is going to start teaching select computer science students to write software viruses in a special new disconnected lab. Will Canada be accused of training the world's next generation of cyber-terrorists... or peacekeepers?"

2 of 350 comments (clear)

  1. They might be accused... by MattCohn.com · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I'm sure they will be ACCUSED of it, but I think everyone here sees the real reason. How can you know how to secure your systems if you don't know what the virus writers are doing?

    And I'm sure that a select number of people will use this information maliciously, but everything comes at a cost. I don't think it would be a good idea if no one but the 'bad guys' knew how to write a virus, because then no one but them would know how to keep their systems secure from them.

  2. That's how I learned by PetoskeyGuy · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Anyone remember Mark Ludwig? I remember getting "The Little Black Book of Computer Viruses" and his other books. It contained excellent explanations of how programs work, COM, EXE strcutre and then how to use ASM to modify those programs. There were ever some polymorphic virus in there all with Source Code. His later books, The Big Black Book of Computer Viruses and Computers, Viruses and Artificial Life were all right, and discussed Alife ideas about the code really being alive in the "world" of the computer.

    I haven't read his latest book, The Little Black Book of Email Viruses: A Technical Guide. I haven't thought about that stuff in a long time. It did allow me to find the ILoveYou virus and fix it at our company by quickly renaming the wscript.exe program since I learned to think about viruses in terms of what they needed to reproduce.

    Personally I think the Novell file security system would be an excellent way to combat viruses and other things. Read, Write, Execute, Copy, Modify and a few others all as true seperate rights. Pain in the but to configure, but very nice once it was setup

    Windows NTFS is a little better then just Read Only, Hidden, and System, but even the standard Linux RWX3 rights make me miss Novell. Anyone know if there is there a filesystem out there for Linux that has that level of rights?

    Personally I don't know if it's possible to have a secure system that that is still usable by the masses who just want to check there email and click OK on every message box that pops up. It's hard enough to secure things when you know what your doing.