This Bug Man Is a Pest

I'm absolutely outraged by this article. I want learn it . see my article about security: http://www.emaxinfo.com

i want profeesor ledmin to teach me, il pay him,, i know his students will be making millions of ligit money by big software companies i would get on a plane now and fly straigh in to ledmins class, you keep an eye on his students i bet they all end up millionaires, lucky buggars, i want in to make this pc world a safer place

i would pay to go be teached by him, i can bet any mney that these students will be earning millions in 5 may be 10 years time, unless tey decide to get together and prove us wrong and put te world pc in to chaos, but what abouth tha 16 yr old bot, what was it he made a programme in is bedroom witch messed up god knows how many peoples pc's and thers my friend te greatest hacker i knew, now hes serving 8 years in jail, and e says the 2.4 million he made was not wort it, but going back to tese students i would love to be one of them trust me they are our future and out basically goverment. without pc's te world would be a a standstill, so basically they could ecome the world's most powerfull bomb. worse than we can imagine. or we put a like a curfew tag on them make them work for big pc companies and tey get rich, but because tey are maing soo much money tey do not turn to pc crime, please please let me join your class proffesor:)

just what we need

I think this is absolutely brilliant. I took a computer security course (sadly online) and the amount of stuff I learned in the one semester, I would have drooled in class at the complexity and brain power needed to understand and successfully execute a security algorithm.

I am a freelance pc tech and a systems admin at a firm in manhattan, NY. These students are being armed with the tools they will need when they graduate, hopefully they are in their later years of college. I run across countless computers that have spyware problems, as this is a very profitable business.

Spyware companies spend millions for hackers and other devious code writers to circumvent all possible security holes, tricks, manipulation and the like in an effort to annoy the customer to no end and scare them sh!tle$$. And most computer users are NOT smart enough to know that even buying WinAntivirus will NOT get rid of the virus/spyware problems and popups. Sometimes I have to manually remove dll and dummy files that hide all over the place, to manually starting specific services and removing fake ones that transmit over your internet connection. Software solutions will almost never be enough as there are so many holes to fill, it makes sense to just keep patching them. Windows XP and Vista are so easy to get into, its almost rediculous to even broadcast a tutorial on TV as almost no one will get it, lol.

Just like a mechanic knows how to fix a specific problem with your car, these students will come out knowing how to effectively get rid of these threats and annoyances.

Leon B.

I think this is absolutely brilliant. I took a computer security course (sadly online) and the amount of stuff I learned in the one semester, I would have drooled in class at the complexity and brain power needed to understand and successfully execute a security algorithm.

I am a freelance pc tech and a systems admin at a firm in manhattan, NY. These students are being armed with the tools they will need when they graduate, hopefully they are in their later years of college. I run across countless computers that have spyware problems, as this is a very profitable business.

Spyware companies spend millions for hackers and other devious code writers to circumvent all possible security holes, tricks, manipulation and the like in an effort to annoy the customer to no end and scare them sh!tle$$. And most computer users are NOT smart enough to know that even buying WinAntivirus will NOT get rid of the virus/spyware problems and popups. Sometimes I have to manually remove dll and dummy files that hide all over the place, to manually starting specific services and removing fake ones that transmit over your internet connection. Software solutions will almost never be enough as there are so many holes to fill, it makes sense to just keep patching them. Windows XP and Vista are so easy to get into, its almost rediculous to even broadcast a tutorial on TV as almost no one will get it, lol.

Just like a mechanic knows how to fix a specific problem with your car, these students will come out knowing how to effectively get rid of these threats and annoyances.

Leon B.

Since these companies are so negative about these students, why dont they put the mouth where their code is and have an anti-virus competition with these students .... a virus neither competitor has dealt with that is within the scope of the students class and see who can come up with the best security solution.

I am a former student of Ledins in other classes, and must say that my colleagues that came out of that class really know there stuff about COMPUTER SECURITY. Everyone talks about how these students are writing viruses, but forget the whole point of the class, to make computers more secure. This subject is incredibly complex with encryption and decryption algorithms that are begging quantum computing to aid in their computation. So in a subject as complex as this, why not arm students with everything they need to stop these new threats. Clearly these companies are afraid of the direction that education is going.

So many people cheering him on.

Do any of you use locks on your house?

Would you be cheering a course at your local school on how to pick locks? Hey, you have to know how to picks locks to build better ones, right?

The Internet is worldwide. Any school is local for everyone around the world.

I think those who favor this school of thought are misinformed. What the schools need to teach computing "proofs". I notice that few CS students today know anything about coding proofs. A perfectly written program would have no *code* vulnerabilities (people can still be suckered to just open the locked door and let people in, called social engineering). But perfect programming is sometimes considered unwieldy. But at least, when programmers make their stuff "more efficient," they should know what they're cutting and the risk exposure that they're introducing. For too long, programmers didn't know or pay attention to making sure they wrote their programs well.

I learned how to pick locks in school. Hope he's also teaching ethics of programming at the same time so the students aren't tempted to turn their new found knowledge into easy cash.

McAfee and Symantec truly manufacture useless products. They are the MS of security software. I remember using a free online scanner which found 1 rootkit and a virus-variant and what did my all-paid-for and uptodate Norton detect? Nothing, I was using an infected pc all that time!

I've been trying to build support for Ledin's crusade via my columns in ACM QUEUE Magazine. There's a depressing apathy in the IT community but once you've suffered a malware invasion (as opposed to reading of other folks' troubles) it's amazing how quickly you 'see the light.' BUT, here's a MAJOR CAVEAT: we are still far from the point where the INTENTIONS of a piece of code can be automatically discerned by scanning its bytes. We still rely heavily on looking for PATTERNS based on KNOWN Malware attacks. New malware strategies creep by until the harm is detected, analyzed and added to the KNOWN virus database. As other commenters have noted, it's an endless fight between invaders and defenders. We need the CLEVER sods like Ledin and his Lads on our side. YET, let's not expect that Man's Innate Propensity for EVIL will go away any time soon.

Stan Kelly-Bootle

I agree, we need to hire the best hackers around, pay them extremely well, and use them to take out the other hackers who might actually do some harm. I like to think that the C.I.A. has already thought of this, and is already implementing it. It's much like the "Catch Me If You Can" type of phenomena. Also, i'm constantly hearing about Chinese hackers hacking into U.S. government websites...scary stuff, and it shouldn't be happening. Time to kick some hacker @$$ America, the Chinese are snooping around our government websites literally all the time. It's only a matter of time before an adversary of the U.S. attempt s to attack us using cyber-warfare, we need to be ready, and we need to be outsmarting these dingleberries!

hackers are the lowest form of predators there is, much like a pedophile, who seeks out to find his next vulnerable child. they are *** worthless.

More power to him.

The best defense against black-hat hackers is black-hats fighting for the good guys (grey-hats). It's a constant race to see who is better. Being able to easily identify vulnerabilities is the first step in preventing (that's right, preventing, not just "fixing") them.

Naturally, the commercial anti-virus company would be peeved. They see it as a potential threat. Instead, they should be seeing these students as pools for potential employment. The federal government is foolish to trust the nation's security to faceless coders behind locked doors. There's no real guarantee of quality when the company hired is also holding the metrics for "success."

Hackers of the world unite!

It's great to see this instructor taking positive action to educate students. There are many analogies - like trying to build cars without engineers studying crash tests. Malware only exists because of flaws in programs. If students are taught these issues it will greatly help future products to be less susceptible to attack.

Too many vulnerabilities get exploited, & I'm tired of living in fear. I've known, & fairly tech-savvy people are aware that companies like Symantec/Norton offer (incomplete) protection, it's a joke to pay so much money for it. These programs are so painful, it's hardly different than computer viruses. Root for the underdog, who is taking the time to understand, create, & maybe revolutionize anti-virus/malware protection.

I see no cause for concern. This man is teaching something that should be required for all computer science students. You don't have to go to college to learn how to exploit and make malware you can learn it on the internet. Ledin hopes to reverse the trend my startting what will probably turn in to a generation of ethical hacking and anti malware defense. You have to know what the problem is and how it go there to stop it. It doesn't matter how much you spent on you anti virus program. I have seen some spend thousands of dollars and I have seen some spend nothing and still end up with the same exact virus. The cure is education. How not to get that virus, and when and if you do get it, how to stop it.

It is true that the only way you can fight a computer virus is to understand how it is constructed. So what is being done to teach students how to write it will help over all because they will understand it.