13 of 34

Yes

Write now Article Tools

Yes, often these writers, when they are apprehended pay fines of hundreds of thousands of dollars and end up working for a computer software firm doing security. There have been cases of computer virus writers going to jail and being in trouble with the law how many times have you seen people's computers being seized and the virus writer being thrown in the back seat of the police car. Jeanson James is spending 57 months in jail, which I do think is reasonable; when computers fail they cost people time and money, and that's typically all that is lost no one is dying or anything, it isn't murderous these are usually just rouges that want to see what they can do and brag to their peers or make a name for themselves it is rarely that personal of a crime. Occasionally you hear of those infamous crimes of passion, such as that of an individual recently that got in his car and drove to Texas to burn someone's trailer down but that isn't the norm.

But yes, if people can go to jail for spam they should go to jail for viruses as well. Now they rarely do, because as mentioned earlier companies often swoop them up and get them to work on the right side of the law, which isn't necessarily the right thing to do but I can often understand why it is done. People have this mentality that virus writers can simply hack into people's accounts all day and steal money from major businesses and never have to suffer any real penalties for their actions and be set for life. An old article from 2003 on NPR suggests that virus writers themselves aren't being apprehended but those that spread the viruses do, sort of how people that spread copies of music that someone else ripped are the ones paying the exorbitant fines and get stuck with the bill.

Yet has much changed in four years? The mantra amongst techicians is that most amateur virus writers aren't going to waste their time with Macintosh or other Unix derivative systems like Linux because of the complexities of getting into those systems, as opposed to Windows which was relatively wide open, with the exception of Vista, which will usher in a new level of security for most Windows users. It that the users do not have information that the hackers want, or that the systems are not a challenge, but most amateurs are accustomed to runnings scripts in environments like Visual Basic, as opposed to the native layers of C/C++ that create the engine behind Linux systems. Often it can be rather difficult to even run a Linux

• 1
• 2
• next page >>

Add your voice

Know something about Should computer virus writers go to jail??
We want to hear your view. Write now!