All computer viruses have an author. It was programmed by a real live person with the sole intent of creating a piece of software that will function like a virus. The people who create computer viruses are fairly tech inclined as they obviously have good programming skills. In fact, some virus programmers are actually employed as programmers. They are not employed to create viruses, however they may work for a large IT company performing legitimate programming but create viruses in their spare time. Or perhaps their creation of the computer virus was a more or less one-time thing on their part just to see if they could do it. Which leads us to ask: why would a person create a computer virus? Reasons could include:

• Seeing if they can do it
• Getting revenge (on a company, for example)
• To generally create trouble
• To gain notoriety and see if they can get their work talked about in the press
• To combat boredom

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To get an idea of the type of people who create computer viruses, we can take a profile of a young virus programmer named Mario who was profiled in a 2004 article in the New York Times by Clive Thompson:

Mario stubs out his cigarette and sits down at the desk in his bedroom. He pops into his laptop the CD of Iron Maiden’s ”Number of the Beast,” his latest favorite album. ”I really like it,” he says. ”My girlfriend bought it for me.” He gestures to the 15-year-old girl with straight dark hair lounging on his neatly made bed, and she throws back a shy smile. Mario, 16, is a secondary-school student in a small town in the foothills of southern Austria. (He didn’t want me to use his last name.) His shiny shoulder-length hair covers half his face and his sleepy green eyes, making him look like a very young, languid Mick Jagger. On his wall he has an enormous poster of Anna Kournikova — which, he admits sheepishly, his girlfriend is not thrilled about. Downstairs, his mother is cleaning up after dinner. She isn’t thrilled these days, either. But what bothers her isn’t Mario’s poster. It’s his hobby.

When Mario is bored — and out here in the countryside, surrounded by soaring snowcapped mountains and little else, he’s bored a lot — he likes to sit at his laptop and create computer viruses and worms. Online, he goes by the name Second Part to Hell, and he has written more than 150 examples of what computer experts call ”malware”: tiny programs that exist solely to self-replicate, infecting computers hooked up to the Internet. Sometimes these programs cause damage, and sometimes they don’t. Mario says he prefers to create viruses that don’t intentionally wreck data, because simple destruction is too easy. ”Anyone can rewrite a hard drive with one or two lines of code,” he says. ”It makes no sense. It’s really lame.” Besides which, it’s mean, he says, and he likes to be friendly.

But still — just to see if he could do it — a year ago he created a rather dangerous tool: a program that autogenerates viruses. It’s called a Batch Trojan Generator, and anyone can download it freely from Mario’s Web site. With a few simple mouse clicks, you can use the tool to create your own malicious ”Trojan horse.” Like its ancient namesake, a Trojan virus arrives in someone’s e-mail looking like a gift, a JPEG picture or a video, for example, but actually bearing dangerous cargo.

Mario starts up the tool to show me how it works. A little box appears on his laptop screen, politely asking me to name my Trojan. I call it the ”Clive” virus. Then it asks me what I’d like the virus to do. Shall the Trojan Horse format drive C:? Yes, I click. Shall the Trojan Horse overwrite every file? Yes. It asks me if I’d like to have the virus activate the next time the computer is restarted, and I say yes again.

Then it’s done. The generator spits out the virus onto Mario’s hard drive, a tiny 3k file. Mario’s generator also displays a stern notice warning that spreading your creation is illegal. The generator, he says, is just for educational purposes, a way to help curious programmers learn how Trojans work.

But of course I could ignore that advice. I could give this virus an enticing name, like ”britney–spears–wedding–clip.mpeg,” to fool people into thinking it’s a video. If I were to e-mail it to a victim, and if he clicked on it — and didn’t have up-to-date antivirus software, which many people don’t — then disaster would strike his computer. The virus would activate. It would quietly reach into the victim’s Microsoft Windows operating system and insert new commands telling the computer to erase its own hard drive. The next time the victim started up his computer, the machine would find those new commands, assume they were part of the normal Windows operating system and guilelessly follow them. Poof: everything on his hard drive would vanish — e-mail, pictures, documents, games.

I’ve never contemplated writing a virus before. Even if I had, I wouldn’t have known how to do it. But thanks to a teenager in Austria, it took me less than a minute to master the art.

Mario drags the virus over to the trash bin on his computer’s desktop and discards it. ”I don’t think we should touch that,” he says hastily.

Not all authors of computer viruses actually spread their work. Some do it just to see if they can. Others will publish their work on the web with full documentation for the purposes of educating or bragging rights. While they might not personally spread the virus, somebody else will.

The people who work to spread computer viruses, whether they are the authors or not, are usually people who are out for mischief. These people are called “script kiddies”. This is a slang term, usually thought of as derisive, which is used to refer to young hackers, often of high school or college age, who take the work of others and release it into “the wild”. In the world of computer viruses, “the wild” is used to refer to the world outside of the “lab” where the virus was originally created. Many times, a “script kiddy” does not have the necessary skills to create a virus on their own. However, they have a mischievous side for them and they download the work of others and release it, often claiming they are the author.

Essentially, this means that the spread of computer viruses is the combined work of two groups of people: (1) the original programmer who did it for fun, the challenge, or perhaps something more dark, and (2) the person who is naive and stupid enough to release that virus onto the unwitting public. Sometimes these script kiddies actually are pretty naive, too. Sometimes they will download the virus and modify the source code to include their own identity or the URL to their personal website. This, of course, is designed to lend “street cred” to their supposed programming skills and gain them some fame. Unfortunately for them, it also makes them a lot easier to track down and prosecute by the authorities.

The script kiddy is the obvious bad guy here, but the person who actually programmed the virus is certainly at fault as well. Unfortunately, the law is not so clear. If the programmer is approached, they may admit that they created it but will quickly note that they did not release it into the wild. Legally, then, they didn’t really do anything. The truth is, though, that many of these virus authors put the code online knowing full well some script kiddy is going to come along and let it loose. So we really are looking at havoc by proxy.

Not all virus writers are trying to cause harm. Sometimes viruses are programmed simply to be noticed. For example, some viruses are set to simply display a message right in the middle of the screen. No harm done, but it is definitely noticed by the owner of the infected machine.

Some viruses are programmed specifically to exploit a new hole found in certain software or operating systems. Microsoft Windows and other software by the company is a pretty common target. In fact, Microsoft finds itself a common target for virus writers who are particular hostile toward the company. These programmers actually blame Microsoft for the troubles caused by the viruses, saying that it could not occur if the company released more secure products. Many virus writers resent the fact that Microsoft is so successful and is used on so many computers. They take pride in causing trouble for the software giant. At the same time, the typical end user of Microsoft Windows is not always computer literate and this makes for easy victims. If the user of Windows doesn’t know enough to know how to avoid infections (as is common for many new computer users), it is really easy for infections to spread.

It is really hard to say if Microsoft finds itself a target because of it’s poor product quality or simply because it is the “big dog” in the industry.

The virus screen is oddly very social. Many viruses are created solely for the bragging rights and the “street cred”. Virus programmers are very intelligent. They may not be the most socially adept and they find friendship with other programmers. They are often very libertarian and do not like to confirm to societal norms. Many of them have a chip on their shoulder. Perhaps they got fired by a company and want to get back them. Perhaps they want to take a poke at the industry after failing to get a job.

Most virus writers are quick to justify what they do. They are quick to say that they are not the ones spreading the virus. They have simply created a program that is designed to self-replicate but it is the actions of the end user that allows the process to proceed. They argue that they cannot be held accountable for the naïve actions of somebody else. This is a very similar argument as is sometimes used with guns. The virus creator may have created the gun, but they can’t be blamed for what the gun is used for. Virus programmers don’t spread viruses – people do.

For those who fight viruses, casual virus programmers and “script kiddies” are not the real threat. Sure, they can create a lot of trouble. However, it is fairly predictable and it can be dealt with. What keeps them up at night are the more sinister ones – those viruses designed specifically for criminal purposes.

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