Teaching computer viruses in college

University of Calgary officials say the school has taken appropriate precautions and will use a closed network and prohibit students from removing disks from the virus-infected labs, which will be secured 24 hours a day.

For his part, Trend Micro's Perry said there is little need to study virus writing at all, given the simplicity of most malicious code. But it is that very financial motive that Barker said will keep his school's students focused on preventing viruses rather than launching them.

However, students who opt for the Calgary class won't be able to turn to antivirus software maker Sophos for employment after they graduate. With 80, viruses in existence there can be no excuse for teaching students on how to create more. Be respectful, keep it civil and stay on topic. But what about protecting the family computer from kids who download games or ringtones that disguise viruses or malware?

If your kids use a computer, then you probably know all the basics about keeping them safe online. But, of course, nothing about this parenting gig is easy.

Plenty, as it turns out. A couple of clicks later and your child has entered his mailing address — because how else will he get his free iPod? Some respond by simply forbidding kids to use the internet at all. Ledin compares the companies' hold over antivirus technology under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of , the companies' codes are kept secret to cryptography decades ago, when the new science of scrambling data was largely controlled by the National Security Agency.

Slowly, the government opened the field to universities and companies, and now there are thousands of minds producing encryption that is orders of magnitude more complex than code from just a decade ago. That's why you can safely transmit your credit-card numbers online.

But that would require infrastructure and financial support, which the federal government so far has declined to give. Until then, Ledin will have to live with his reputation as the guy who gave away the secrets to the Internet's bomb. Newsweek magazine delivered to your door Unlimited access to Newsweek.

This spring semester, he taught the course at Sonoma State University. It got a lot of press coverage. No one wrote a virus for a class project. No new malware got into the wild. No new breed of supervillian graduated. Tags: antivirus , hacking , malware , schools , security education. I totally agree. And if so, the trade off to build a generation of trained scientists that know the anatomy of malware is a very good one to research on protection.

There have already been several other schools that have taught similar courses, so this is nothing new. I agree as well, Bruce. It leads me to wonder what those companies considered such a threat to them.

More sophisticated counter-arguments often sound like no more than sophisticated versions of that strawman, wrapped up in a few layers of obfuscation and misdirection. If someone has a non-strawman counter-argument, then could they please sketch it clearly, plainly and concisely? Twenty-five words or less? In my level security class 2 years ago or so our prof tried to explain some of the techniques and practices of malware writers, but as an academic his information was about 5 years behind the wild.

That prof is fairly well-known in academia for the security field, but he was telling us about the threats from like they were the up-and-coming threats of I think this underscores a big problem with the idea of teaching malware in academia: it is ahead of the game on some areas, and way behind on others.