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Students Learn To Write Viruses

Posted by samzenpus on from the mischief-101 dept.

snocrossgjd writes "In a windowless underground computer lab in California, young men are busy cooking up viruses, spam and other plagues of the computer age. Grant Joy runs a program that surreptitiously records every keystroke on his machine, including user names, passwords, and credit-card numbers. Thomas Fynan floods a bulletin board with huge messages from fake users. Yet Joy and Fynan aren't hackers — they're students in a computer-security class at Sonoma State University. Their professor, George Ledin, has showed them how to penetrate even the best antivirus software."

2 of 276 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Not Hackers? by fm6 · · Score: 5, Informative

    In ordinary English, a hacker is somebody who hacks into a computer system. That's not the way you and I use the word, but we're not most people. "Hacker" is one many words that means different things depending on who uses it and in one context. Language is not a map.

    Hackers (in the senses of "improvisational programmer" or "ethical student of security technology") often don't grasp this, and insist that the common usage of "hacker" is "incorrect" — even though the people who use it that way are in the majority. They've tried to get people to say "cracker" instead, ignoring the very small role Nabisco plays in computer security issues.

  2. we have that in vienna for years... by Meshugga · · Score: 5, Informative

    as a two-semester course.

    It is held at the technical university in vienna and is called "InetSec"

    http://www.iseclab.org/InetSec/

    The course has a very high quality and includes practical exercises like sql exploits, writing buffer overflows, trojans and the like.

    You even get your own automatically generated "1337 handle" upon subscription to the course, and you can advance from "script kiddy" (not homework assignments aka challenges turned in) to "master guru" (turned in everything + extra work + participated in a CTF) - so actually participating in the course is more fun and play than work ;)

    I wonder why that article is news, since there is a CTF (http://www.cs.ucsb.edu/~vigna/CTF/) held every year, where a lot of universities and colleges from everywhere participate - i doubt they don't have similar courses.

    Then again, since the viennese guys kick ass at these contests... ;)