Advanced topic: teenage hackers write most viruses

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MYTH: "teenage hackers write most of the viruses out there" (advanced discussion)

Rob Rosenberger says:

Let's talk some more about "middle-aged men in business suits." Fred Cohen, widely accepted as the "father" of computer viruses, wrote his doctoral thesis on this subject. His 1990 book, A Short Course on Computer Viruses, describes him this way:

"Widely known for his pioneering work on computer viruses... His famous 1984 paper 'Computer Viruses -- Theory and Experiments' started the field of computer virus research, and is one of the most widely cited papers in the computing field today."

Teenage hackers don't regularly "cite papers." And as we noted earlier, teenagers only recently could afford a computer. People in the business/government/academic computing fields often cite papers and their employers have always had the money to buy computers. This leads to an important question: who specifically cites Cohen's work, and why? (I don't know the answer.)

Now let's talk about the military. The U.S. Defense Department has almost unlimited resources for research & development. Teenage hackers don't. SIGNAL magazine (a monthly publication of the Armed Forces Communications & Electronics Association) occasionally prints stories about "information warfare," e.g. using a computer virus as a military weapon. A recent SIGNAL analysis article defined a new word ("netwar") to describe

"non- to low-violent wars waged by governments, at the societal level [emphasis added], against illicit groups and organizations involved in terrorism..."

Now, don't write me off as a "military conspiracy" kook! I only want people to recognize the business, academia, and military roles in the field of computer viruses. Teenage hackers just happen to receive most of the media attention.

For further reading

USAF establishes an information warfare unit
Transcript of a speech given by Air Force chief of staff General Ronald Fogelman. In it he coins a new 'IAD' acronym: "infiltrate, attack, and defend."

The Generic Virus Writer
Sarah Gordon, now a virus researcher at IBM, profiles four case studies of people who write viruses: an adolescent, a college student, a professionally employed person, and a "mature reformed" ex-writer.