The Psychology of Virus Writers

securitas writes "BBC Technology reports on the psychology of virus writers and the work of security researcher Sarah Gordon, who has been studying this area for 20 years. ''The stereotype that virus writers are all young teenage boys with no social life, hiding in their basement is not accurate,' she said. In contrast, she said, most virus creators are typical for their age, are on good terms with friends and family and are often contributors to their local community.' The story is an interesting contrast to a previous BBC report about why people write viruses."

Comments

Re:virus-con

[BrynM]

Do virus writers really go to virus conventions? I'd think you'd find people like Ms Gordon, undercover FBI, wannabe 133t teenagers, and maybe a couple former virus writers out of jail and trying to find admiration.

Well, they may have attended H2K or H2K2. How about Defcon? I heard plenty of stories about the Fed being there. Lots of poseurs too.

Re:virus-con

[Omestes]

Using the term hacker is not vague to the general public. The word has a very concrete meaning, to most people it means someone who does bad things with computers, i.e. use them to steal data, crack systems, mess up corporate and governmental websites, and such.

Sure, geeks and /.ers use the term to mean ubergeeks with a more egalitarian ethical system, but joe public does not understand this. They we either not around when the word hacker was used as a benevelant tag, nor are they as deep in the geek community and mystique.

So the use of the word geek does not make the article loose validity.

Re:Why people write viruses?

[IM6100]

That's a really weird outlook. You sound like somebody who wears his necktie too tight or something.

Writing self-replicating code that 'lives' in cyberspace is 'cool.' It's completely uncool when it is used in malevolent ways and/or damages anything.

The hacker 'ethic' demands that nothing be damaged, it's more like climbing a mountain 'because it is there.'

Oh the other hand, most of the 'modern' viruses are neither interesting nor technically oriented. Hell, I remember peeking into 'virus writing newsletters' half a decade ago, and even then it was almost entirely people distributing debug shell scripts to generate virus binaries. There was very little of the commented ASM source code that would be technically interesting.

There are a few thoughtful and interesting places to find info about and study computer viruses. Chase down a copy of 'A Pathology of Computer Viruses' by David Ferbrache, Springer-Verlag, 1992. If you can find one. (I notice Amazon has one used copy available for $240.)