This Bug Man Is a Pest

WHAT HE IS DOING MAY BE LOOKED DOWN UPON BUT SO IS STEM CELL RESEARCH. tHERE IS A LOT OF GOOD THAT CAN COME OUT OF TEACHING PEOPLE TO WRITE VIRUSES.

This is excellent. The computer industry needs staff who understand the internals of the platforms and how to express the vulnerabilities. Regardless of what these students learn and do, the vulnerabilities exist and will be exploited by evil-doers for profit or worse.

If you ask me, McAfee should hire him to teach them how to make their anti-virus software better. Sounds like they are jealous. ;-)

Good for him. Computer code good and bad is not the equivelant of the Atom Bomb. A closer analogy would be to gun control whereby taking them away from law abiding citizens would leave them only in the hands of criminals.

Good going Ledin. "A man ahead of his time" Maybe one day sooner than you think we'll have a National, if not International (HACKER REGISTRY). Sounds like something the Government would love to get into.

Technically, these young men are hackers. All computer programmers are hackers. What the author meant, I'm sure, is that they aren't crackers--people who deliberately disrupt computer security.

Kudos for Ledin. He is absolutely right -- teaching how viruses are made sounds like the beginning of a class on how to prevent them. The "G-man" wants to control who gets to learn the insides of computers. We should all know more about the protection we have and how to increase our security, since we ALL rely on computers now and will replace paper and communication in the near future. Wish much luck to Ledin and his potential program!

Kudos for Ledin. He is absolutely right -- teaching how viruses are made sounds like the beginning of a class on how to prevent them. The "G-man" wants to control who gets to learn the insides of computers. We should all know more about the protection we have and how to increase our security, since we ALL rely on computers now and will replace paper and communication in the near future. Wish much luck to Ledin and his potential program!

Kudos to this man for exposing the near uselessness of today???s antivirus software. Hopefully some real software security company will also see the value here and provide him with a grant.

Not only are the big M and S kidding themselves if they think they're staying a step ahead, they'd be incredibly foolish to think that Mr. Ledin is the only one teaching this type of class or that computer science students are doing it on their own. Many businesses across the US that help already infected users, many of which had M & S installed, fix their machines, started out by figuring out how these malware instances are created.

Remaining in the dark ages by believing his tactics are punishable shows ignorance in a field that requires constantly expanding minds. Congratulations to Mr. Ledin for helping today's students truly be well-rounded!

I am a along time computer network consultant, and I for one, have never felt that I knew enough, about hacking specifically, to do any more than set up my firewall with best practices and keep my servers patched and AV-protected. I wonder what, if anything, gets through.

I really think that these types of courses are necessary for the good guys to understand what the bad guys are doing.

I Ledin truely wants to help, then he should just allow the computer sucurity compaines (not just anti-virus makers, but Cicso, SunGard, IBM, Microsoft, Apple, etc) have access to the data they are producing. If one of the students comes up with some brilliant new model (like the melissa virus 10 years ago) then the companies can see what to react to. But honestly the source of the security has to come from the harware, and operating system manufacturers. Any lock can be opened, any code broken, any protection thwarted. Minimizing those risks is what it is about, and if someone else is hit first, you benefit from the solution before you are hit.

FiveofClubs

It pays to be intelligent. People may fear this new mindset, however, in the end it may be what saves us.... This tecnological step in making it to the "next level" can only help us. I hate paying for software that will not protect my system... So if there are individuals who can break McAfee then perhaps McAfee should produce software that is "quality". As there name suggest Mc A Fee... just pay the fee...

He would be lucky if he just went to prison, because China currently uses capital punishment for many crimes, such as tax evasion, corruption and racketeering.

He should be sent to prison for a very long time...

Ledin is perfectly on target and the security companies are clueless. Having worked in the security industry for 10 years I can tell you anti-virus is a racket and I would not have any problem hiring any of his students unlike the dated so called security companies. If you're going to design a better lock you have to know how to pick all the locks out there today. I also see Ledin training the next generation of cybersoldier. China and North Korea have crash courses in computer hacking and our military is playing catch up because other than Ledin there is little in the way of formal education in the art of hacking. If McAfee and Symantec were really concerned about security they would not have been bested by companies like Internet Security Systems and eEye who have next generation technology, which isn't perfect so they're better but not much. The anti-virus companies are out dated and only exist to sell you a subscription.

i think this is a great idea, exactly what colleges should be teaching. i mean if all these AV software firms are so good then all he is teaching should be common knowledge to them and no big thing. The only way your going to provide a good defense is to know your enemy and this encourages the students to think off the tracks and really push themselves; good work!

How are we to ever keep up with the bad seed hacker's if we don't think like hackers and come up with better means to defend our information. We still regularly send confidential or very personal notes to each other through e-mail. It's time to move on and be more secure, try something like Whisper Bot that just came on the scene at http://www.whisperbot.com . It allows you to send secure notes to each other, without the chance for someone to just hack your email account and see the informatuion.