Except for the viruses that Norton is writing, to me, that’s essentially what these thigns are.
They’re just being assholes for the sake of being assholes.
That would take a real assholish person to go to a card catalog and just start rearranging cards. But, you can’t show it off to your freinds or anything.
Still, if a company like Norton sold a “card un-shuffler”, I bet they’d send people into libraries to shuffle the cards every now and then.
These days, they’re in it for profit: spamming and extortion via DOS attacks.
Please don’t assume that the IT department is incompetent. When cleaning a virus off a network, it only takes one user to forget that they’ve got a laptop at home / in the drawer / whatever to undo much of the work of disinfection. Indeed, you might consider it to their credit that the reinfection was discovered so quickly.
Some people aren’t out for selfish gain; they just want to make a difference in the world.
A lot of viruses use sophisiticated social programming, which is probably even more interesting than the real thing.
The guys that just take a ready made virus and hack it so that it has their name on it… they do not have much intellectual curiosity. But the original virus writers do.
I read an SF book a while back, possibly by Greg Bear, set around 100 years in the future. In one chapter, they discuss computer viruses as a historical oddity. They mention that Singapore (which had since become a hugely powerful entity) passed stringent laws against writing viruses, including unilateral extradition. Viruses pretty much died out after several virus writers were kidnapped, brought to Singapore, and executed after prolonged public torture. I know it’s wrong and all, but damn that was a satisfying passage to read.
Intellectual curiosity, my ass.
There is nothing sophisticated about it. Many people will open an attachment if the subject is ‘I love you’. There’s nothing sophisticated about that.
The truly intellectually curious create things. Destroying things is easy.
The intellectually curious experiment. Everything else is morality.
And the OP is having quite a bit of trouble destorying these viruses. Probably more trouble than the creation of the system in the first place.
I could pour sand into your car’s gas tank. Just because it totally hoses an expensive piece of machinery and is a son-of-a-bitch to fix doesn’t make me intellectually curious or as talented as the people responsible for creating the car.
Herein lies the answer.
Were you the first person to think of the sand in the tank idea, and if the car was a Kia or other derivative design then I’d argue that you were.
Computer viruses and other things whose sole purpose is to harm others are one place where my liberal impulses go out the window. If I had superhero vigilante powers, I would spend at least some of my time traveling around the world putting bullets into the back of virus writers’ heads.
Bet you miss the days of the card catalogue, don’t you? 
[ shakes fist at Jackmannii ] Damn you! [ /sfaJ ]
Sure, if you’re a sociopath.
I don’t disagree with that, which is why I haven’t written any viruses. But I can’t understand why one wouldn’t be interested in doing it if morals could be ignored. In the same way that I’d be quite interested in killing someone to see how it felt if it wasn’t for the moral revulsion at doing so. I’m sure that most normal people feel the same way.
Some viruses are designed to hurt a specific target, whether for revenge or for extortion purposes, and get out of control. Lots of people hate Microsoft, for instance, and love to do things that hurt their image.
Some viruses are written just to gain notoriety for the creator, especially if they found an obscure security hole that they were the first person to figure out how to exploit.
Some viruses are written simply for the same purpose random mailboxes get destroyed by vandals - a certain mindset just likes breaking stuff.
Some viruses create backdoors into the infected system, allowing the creator to come back and exploit it for profit or other purposes later - in some cases, a virus will have no noticable symptoms and lurk in millions of systems because the creator wanted to have lots of available systems they can exploit in the future. Sometimes the virus is intended for one specific system but it is spread to several so the target does not realize they are being specifically targetted.
Some viruses are used for denial of service attacks - infect a few million computers, and have them all start sending data packets at some big corporation’s computers at a specific date.
Some are created for profit - spammers can gather email addresses with viruses, or open up a backdoor on your mailserver to allow them to send untraceable spam through your equipment. Some are made so the criminal can gather credit card info or other info useful for identity theft or other nefarious purposes.
Some viruses are created for one purpose and mutate into new varieties as errors creep into their code as they spread.
And I too believe that some viruses are created by anti-virus manufacturers.
You are much nicer than I am. I’d Make An Example of virus writers.
These days virus writing is a business. Someone wants their website hocked, or their competitors hosed, so someone writes a worm which pops up advertising, or a trojan which zombifys a bunch of PCS to form a DDOS attack. Some viruses start life as a exploit posted to a IT security site with examples on how to repeat the attack so the developers can fix and then debug their fixes. If the developers don’t fix it and release patches quickly some asshole is going to come along and write a worm to take advantage of it, building on the work of the security-minded IT person who discovered the flaw in the first place and provided a rough plan on how to exploit it.
In both of these situations the motives of the person who found the core algorithms which compromise the system are clear. It’s the people who add on devestating payloads who are just being assholes.
Enjoy,
Steven
I think there’s a confusion here between the intellectual curiousity and the malicious. There are plenty of people who write algorithms or discover security holes for, at worst, morally neutral ends, and often for positive ends. Then there are those who realize they can take this knowlege and turn it to their own ends.
IMO, other than the viruses written by Symantec or corporate espionage or whatever, I think a vast majority of them are just written by people who didn’t grow out of being (or still are) in a teenaged mindset.
For instance, how many people here egged houses when you were in high school? Did you only ever do it to someone you didn’t like, or did you ever do it randomly? If it was targetted, did you throw some at adjacent houses too so the target would have a harder time knowing it was them and thus figuring out who did it? You knew, somewhere deep down, that several hours of labor would have to be spent to clean up your 15 seconds of fun, but you did it anyway.
It’s that mentality, the whole idea of chaos and thrill that drives them. Sure they know that many hours will be spent fixing their trash, but that’s not present… at least, not until they grow up, get an IT job, and get stuck fixing problems just like the ones they use to cause.