Death to Hackers!

[lisa]

Well, I was gonna stay out of this one, but I'll throw my two cents in...

Most of these "hackers" are rather young people who are still "learning" a lot about computers. At that age (and I remember all the geeks in college who did things like this -- though not as bad as what we are talking about) they like to experiment and see what they can do.

If you look closely, most of the virii that propigate a lot tend to propigate and do little else -- realitively minor things compared to the things that they could do to an infected system.

AFAIK, computers (especially insecure systems (of whatever OS)), are oen of the few things where someone can do as much damage as they do as easily as they do.

An appro quote here, I think, is: "If builders built buildings the way programmers write programs, the first woodpecker to come along would destroy civilization." IMHO, these people are not much more than the above mentioned woodpeckers -- albiet a bit more malicious.

But with these systems as vulnerable as they are, and no easy tracibility, I think a lot of people I knew many years ago would have a hard time passing up the opportunity to do so.

Or, put another way, if buildings came down with just the tap of a hammer, I honestly think we'd have a lot of (probably much younger kids) running around knocking down buildings -- there is some measure of destructive tendancy in a lot of people. What keeps most in check is their own sense of morals and fear of getting caught and the effort that it takes to "get away with it."

While I do not exhonerate the people who break into these systems. I, personally, put a lot of the responsibility for the crackers ("hackers", BTW, means something else to coders) on the sysadmins and software producers who create the buildings that can fall with a simple tap... oh, and leave all the doors unlocked.