Net Manager
Network Managing, Engineering and Administration with an eye toward security.

Best practices meets the real world!


Friday, May 23, 2003  

Here's a good one, the University of Calgary in Canda has a new course in Computer viruses. The catch is that they will actually teach how to write viruses. Why, you ask, well the teacher has this to say:

He says that in order to develop more secure software, and countermeasures for malicious software, you first need to know how malicious software works and the mindset of its creators. By looking through the eyes of the people who develop these viruses, our students will learn what their targets actually are and what needs to be protected. It's a case of being proactive rather than reactive. This attitude is similar to what medical researchers do to combat the latest biological viruses such as SARS. Before you can develop a cure, you have to understand what the virus is and how it spreads - why should combating computer viruses be any different?

Unfortunately this is flawed logic. Medical researchers do not create malicious viruses in order to figure out how to stop other viruses. Anti-Virus researchers do not create viruses in order to stop them. What they do is study the virus and figure out what it does and what is needed to stop it.

posted by David | 5/23/2003 11:28:00 AM

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