Malicious code

Mostly, I’m sure they find it funny to read about people being inconvenienced by what they’ve done. In short, some people write mobile malicious code for the same reasons vandals break windows and spray paint garage doors that belong to people they don’t even know.
Keep in mind the difference between a hacker and a security cracker. People with a hacker mindset usually find themselves eventually drawn to specific fields of interest.


In some cases, that interest might revolve around understanding self-replicating mobile malicious code. Sometimes, the best way to understand something is to experiment with different ways to create examples of it. Sometimes, the best way to test something you’ve created is to see it operating under real world conditions. Some immoral or amoral hackers with an interest in self-replicating mobile malicious code may test their creations by releasing them into the wild and seeing how they do.


Viruses, worms, Trojans, and even backdoors and other malicious code slipped into your software by the vendor may serve the purposes of espionage. People worry about the potential for Chinese manufactured computers having some kind of hardware backdoor built into them; conspiracy theories about commercial software vendors being required to provide backdoor access to the NSA run rampant; the government of India famously demanded that Blackberry provide universal decryption keys for all Blackberry devices sold in the country.


and the NSA’s Dual_EC_DRBG NIST encryption standard may itself include a backdoor of sorts, as I mentioned in What my grandmother taught me about IT security. Considering the fiasco of federal warrantless wiretapping violations of the law during the Bush administration’s tenure, and the worse violations hinted at by several officials’ carefully phrased testimony that such worse violations weren’t a part of this particular program, it would be foolish to assume that government agencies never spy on people via software. How many of you remember ECHELON?