AlanBarber.Org
Wednesday, May 28, 2003
Virus Writing 101?
According to CNet there's a college in Calgary, Canada planning on teaching an entire course on computer virus writing. Read the article here.I for one find this interesting but... downright disturbing at the same time.
They claim it will help the students to study and learn about how virii spread, infect systems, and cuase damage. I think the quotes from David Perry from Trend Micro put it into perspective.
But David Perry, global director of education for antivirus software maker Trend Micro, said encouraging people to write more viruses is a bad idea.
"Why not have classes in hacking?" Perry said. "Why not have classes in all kinds of malicious computer activity?"
Perry rejects the idea that such training could lead to better bug fighters.
"I don't see there to be any educational value at all," Perry said. "You don't send somebody out to shoot someone so they understand what happens when somebody gets shot."
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For his part, Trend Micro's Perry said there is little need to study virus writing at all, given the simplicity of most malicious code.
"Generally speaking, the people that release viruses into the wild are not very good computer programmers," Perry said. "If you are a very good programmer, somebody hires you to write programs."
Those are exactly the points I agree with. There's no need to teach people about how to program viruses or even how to create anti-virus software. Colleges should be teaching students programming concepts not specific software problems.
It sounds silly but you start with virus writing then you know someone will come along and start a class to teach a class all about making word processors, then spreadsheets, web browsers, email clients, etc. Students will be spending so much time learning to program specific applications they won't have time to learn basic concepts like code reuse, classes, polymorphism, etc.
If anything instead of teaching a virus writting course they should be creating more computer courses dealing with programmer and user ethics, licencing laws, copyright laws, public speaking and interaction, etc. At the end of the day a computer science, MIS, etc student will learn more and be a better programmer, system admin, tech support specialist. etc than anything learned from a course on virus writting.
on 05/28/2003 at 08:22 PM