Government Has No Business Regulating Spam

Virus-Writing Course Stirs Controversy

from the teaching-the-wrong-thing? dept

Tue, May 27th 2003 8:13pm — Mike Masnick

Last week I saw the news that the University of Calgary was looking to start a course in virus writing, in order to see if students could help come up with innovative ways to protect against viruses. To be honest, I didn't think it was that big of a deal, but today, anti-virus groups went ballistic condemning the idea, saying that it was completely unnecessary. They say there's absolutely no reason to write a virus if you're trying to protect against them... Of course, considering the level of virus writing that goes on, I'd say that current anti-virus companies haven't done the greatest job themselves. As someone points out in the article, it's not likely that someone is going to go take this course on purpose to become a malicious virus writer. There are plenty of tools already out there for that. However, this is likely to attract people who are interested in the inner workings of a computer virus, and will give them a chance to "know their enemy" in much greater detail.

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irakli_kv, 12 Mar 2008 @ 8:57am

how to write viruses
it's cool.........
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Adam, 22 Dec 2009 @ 7:30am

Let's keep this in focus here. It only makes sense that if these students are going to be the future of America's antivirus brigade, that they know everything about the code they are trying to stop. This included having intimate knowledge of how to write this code, which goes hand in hand with figuring out ways to stop the code.
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