Spyware

“Why us?” interrupted Alicia, a female student who always sat in the front row. Ray turned to her and noticed that she seemed more surprised by her interruption than he was. She was the quiet type, who rarely spoke out of turn in class, unlike some of the other overly-bright hooligans that Ray had to contend with on a daily basis.

“Because,” sighed Ray, “you’re young, you have time on your hands, and most of all-” he paused, “-because you want to see if you can do it. You want the challenge.”

“But that’s awful,” said Alicia, her face pinched.

“Yes, possibly, but predictable. At this point in your careers, you have the time, and you know just enough to be dangerous. You are at the point in your lives that you are impressed by feats of beer consumption, last decade’s muscle cars and empty sexual conquests. If you’ve made it this far in the difficult field of computer science, then you are also impressed by original and creative coding.

“But let me tell you right now, class, that the creation of wantonly destructive software is a federal crime and that I would not hesitate to turn in any of you who created and distributed such a thing.

“You’d turn us in? Your own students?” questioned Magic. Her eyes were uncharacteristically open. There was a slight, pouting smile on her lips as she asked the question. She was an attractive girl, and the look on her face made Ray wonder if she had a crush on him.

“Just as surely as I’d turn you in for building a bomb or setting fire to the dorms,” replied Ray evenly.

“But it’s not the same thing,” protested Magic, “No one gets hurt.”

“While it’s true that viruses have yet to cause any known deaths-unless you count the viruses used to disable Iraqi air defense systems in the Gulf Wars, that is-it is only a matter of time until they do. Please realize that there are millions of chances a day for software to cause a death. Car ignition and braking systems are controlled by software. Pilots fly airliners in blinding conditions, trusting their intelligent instruments. If these systems become susceptible to attack, many lives are at risk.

“But let me backtrack a bit. In order to more thoroughly understand my position on this, we must examine the nature of viruses in greater detail. Classifying them in terms of behavior, viruses come in three primary flavors. One: the annoying virus. Built to sell something in most cases, rather than vandalize, the annoying virus is more of a prank than a felonious assault. One example I recall vividly. It simply caused a large image of a person’s hand to be drawn on your computer console every time you booted up your machine. The annoying part was that middle finger of this blue hand was extended upwards in a pose that we are all probably familiar with.”

The class laughed aloud.

Ray nodded to them, “Yes, well… Now, that was it for the virus. That’s all it did. If you hit any key, the image was gone and you could go on with your work for the day. Many of us found it mildly amusing and harmless and generally not worth the trouble of hunting down and erasing the carefully hidden files. The virus would of course attempt to spread itself to other machines whenever possible, so that soon everyone in the office was enjoying “Big Blue” as it came to be known.

“After a few weeks, however, the humor wore thin. People gradually realized that they didn’t enjoy being flipped off by Big Blue every morning. It took us a few days to eradicate it from every disk we had, but we finally did it one weekend, with only a minimum of overtime and downtime.”

“Do you still have a copy of that one on disk, Dr. Vance?”

“Ah, no Magic, I’m sorry. As I was saying, there are a fair number of oddballs like that one. I recall another that caused my word processor program to only print in foreign character sets. Umlauts, accents and the like were rampant until you could get it cleaned off. About seventy-five percent of viruses are sales viruses or search engine hijackers. They perform mild trick like that. Unfortunately, some viruses aren’t harmless pranks. The second behavioral type, the data-destructive virus, is fairly common. Approximately twenty percent plus of viruses come under this category and amount to vandalism. In general, these viruses go for the most valued element of any computer system, the hard disk. They use many approaches, from the brute force of a low-level reformat to a subtle jumbling of the file allocation table, but the result is always the loss of hours upon hours of work. Often, this sort of thing does more damage to individuals rather than to companies, as companies tend to more carefully back-up their data.

“Last on the list is the rarest and perhaps most feared type: the hardware destructive virus. These are indeed rare, but do exist.”