College Credits For Spamming

from the useful-career-skills... dept

A few years ago, the University of Calgary received a ton of attention for offering a class in how to write viruses. The argument behind offering the class was that it would help teach students how viruses really worked, which could be useful in helping to prevent viruses later on. Still, many in the anti-virus community (who, you'll note, have yet to really stop virus attacks) were not at all happy. Well, based on that, just imagine how anti-spammers will react to the fact (as pointed out on Broadband Reports) that the same university is now offering a class in how to write spamming software and spyware. Once again, the argument is that by understanding how these types of applications work, they'll be better able to stop them. Of course, there's one major difference between the virus writing course and the spamware/spyware writing course: profits. Most virus are simply destructive, rather than a source of profits. That's not true with spam and spyware, which might make them a bit more attractive for less than ethical students to release them out into the wild. Either way, now that the virus course has been going on a few years, has anyone who has taken it gone on to create a better anti-virus tool?