Grant Joy runs a program that surreptitiously records every keystroke on his machine, including user names, passwords, and credit-card numbers. And Thomas Fynan floods a bulletin board with huge messages from fake users. Yet Joy and Fynan aren't hackers—they're students in a computer-security class at Sonoma State University. And their professor, George Ledin, has showed them how to penetrate even the best antivirus software.
http://www.newsweek.com/id/150465
Back in my university years, we had course dealing with the topic of Data Communications. Not unusual for my faculty, the lab part of the course included a couple of things which had nothing to do with communications. For instance, there was one homework which requested the students to write a boot virus. I went to the assistant and asked for another assignment, as writing viruses is not something I wanted to do. The assistant refused my proposal, refused discussing the subject (he was 'busy') and subsequently gave me 0 points for that particular homework.
Every now and then, in a teaching institution, somebody comes up with the brilliant idea of teaching students about malware. I am not joking here, it IS a brilliant idea. What is however wrong with it, in 99% of the cases, is that the people who come up with the idea have absolutely no clue about ethics or just don't care about it. They also do not understand that writing malware is not the best way to teach people about how to protect against it. Actually, writing malware is the easy way; it is much easier to write malware than writing antivirus programs. Of course, there is also a dark attraction towards writing malware and young people are easy to fall prey to it.
Back to my university years and to the boot virus writing homework, only a few people bothered doing it. Of them, most actually took the Michaelangelo (March6) sourcecode and shuffled it around. A few years later, I heard that homework was removed from the course's curriculum. Most of the people were just taking existing boot viruses and patching them. And it wasn't really a Data Communications assignment per-se.
There are many other more interesting things to teach about than writing viruses, sending spam and circumventing protection solutions. Yet, there will always be people willing to join the dark side, for one reason or another.
The bad thing is that their number seems to be increasing from year to year.
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