Well said.
I actually find this kind of disturbing. Are there any cases you know of where such a thing has been established? Given that these companies would pretty much be wrecked if such a thing were proven, and that their competitors(who have some reasonable expertise at tracking such things) would have a field day if they could show it, how long could one expect to get away with something like this? Symantec putting out a virus is like putting out a puzzle saying “if you solve me, you get all my market share” and McAfee would be all over it, or vice versa. Heck there’s a lot of independents who would love a crack at something like that. I’m not aware of any situation where a virus writer has been tracked and it was someone who had a connection to any of the anti-virus makers.
Since several people seem to hold this opinion, this is a general question. Any evidence this has ever happened?
Enjoy,
Steven
Well, yeah. They sell them at the store for $50 a pop.
I’m sure it didn’t come from the patron computers. I’m certain it came from some dumbass librarian opening something she ought to know better about. Of course we’ve got a firewall and everything, although I admit I don’t know much about it at all, but obviously something got through and it’s a bitch and a half to get rid of. The patron computers are really secure, we’re told. The staff computers are secure but not locked down like the patron ones are. They were so desperate last week they deputized me and a few other librarians to go in and edit the registries to get rid of the thing. (Worked for a little while. Evidently it hid somewhere or something. I’m sure “somewhere” is not in the phones, however, dumbasses.) Talk about “other duties as assigned”! See, in the private sector they’d have been working 24 hours a day until it got fixed. This is not the private sector.
The patrons started to get a little testy today. I could hardly blame them. One of the homeless guys found out they probably wouldn’t be up today and he yelled “Fuck this shit, I’m going to get drunk!” That’s the department motto now.
And no, I don’t miss the card catalogue. I had to maintain one of those all by my lonesome as my first post-MLIS job and I do not miss it at all. Used to have nightmares where when I took the rod out I’d drop the drawer and the cards would go everywhere. <shudder>
Ogre, do you mean what ILS system? We’re Sirsi/Dynix, on Horizon. Luckily, the Horizon server has not, evidently, been affected. From what I hear. Which is nothing, these days. If I go back in on Monday and nothing’s working I might settle down with my Thunderbird in a paper bag in the alley too.
You might be surprised how susceptible a phone system might be to viruses. It takes four servers to drive the phone system in our building. That’s four Windows servers that each need the typical assortment of antivirus and administration as any other computer on the network.
Of course, your library phone system is probably closer to an 8 lines by 32 extensions box in the basement with no network connection, in which case, saying the virus is in the phones is pretty daft.
Add me to the camp that thinks some amount of the viruses out there were created at the request of the antivirus industry.
People write viruses because they’re pricks and they enjoy pissing people off. That’s the top and bottom of it.
They send their viruses and then come to SD to relish this kind of thread. 
I’m with you. I’ve actually seen the code behind the I Love You virus, and I was appalled by how simple it was. Hell, I use similar code to get MS Access to send e-mail messages automatically, and I’m just a VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) hack. The virus was far from sophisticated.
As for intellectual curiousity, I would bet that most people who frequent this board do so out of intellectual curiousity and my friends tend to have so much it could get them into trouble. I find it hard to see a connection between intellectual curiousity and writng a virus. I can see figuring out how a virus works out of curiousity; that’s why I opened up the I Love You virus in the first place. But to actually write one and turn it loose in the world, as far as I’m concerned, requires deliberate malice and cruelty.
I’m sure those who write them do derive pleasure from picturing their effects, just as the kids who hit mailboxes with baseball bats derive pleasure from it. There are people out there who like being cruel and causing chaos. Who knows? Maybe they think they’re being cool or showing off how clever they are. They’re not. They’re just arrogant jerks.
Never mind
Well, no, even at fourteen I was capable of imagining the consequences of randomly interfering with operation of trams full of people, and had enough empathy to not want to hurt a bunch of strangers for no reason.
(I know you’re banned, but maybe you’re still lurking.)
[suspicious glare] All right, which one of you was it? [/suspicious glare]
I don’t know of any evidence, but it would be exceedingly easy to create and distribute a virus without anybody being able to find out you did it. I’m not suggesting that McAfee has a secret “Virus Creation Department” with people being hired specifically to code viruses, with a made up job on the payroll records to cover for them. All it would take would be a skilled coder who worked for the AV company already choosing to, on his own time, to use his knowledge about viruses and virus detection to make new viruses that could slip past the competitor’s product on his own time and upload them to some anonymous public FTP server from an internet cafe or through the local Starbuck’s WiFi network. The motivation would be that they (or their department) could be the first to find these new viruses and protect against them. In a situation where you could benefit your company and your reputation within the company and have 0 chance of being caught, it’s hard to imagine it not happening. If it was never officially encouraged or mentioned in company communications, even if someone decided to sacrifice their reputation as a reputable programmer to reveal that they were creating viruses while working for Norton or whoever, it wouldn’t hurt the company reputation.
Imagine you head a department of people whose job is to update your company’s virus definitions, and the competitor’s last update catches several viruses that your product doesn’t. You’re looking bad to your boss and want to fix that, and you know how to fix this. Some people may be moral enough not to do that, but I’m sure plenty of others would (I probably would, in that situation, if I had the skills).