Upwards of 60,000 viruses are at present coursing through our cyberstream. Assaults range from targeted guerilla attacks to indiscriminate carpet bombing intended to create as much electronic and psychological mayhem as possible. What motivates people to write viruses and why do people fall for their tricks?
Frank Farley, a former American Psychological Association president, calls hackers cyber-delinquents - people with a graffiti-artist mentality desperately seeking to show that they exist, and addicted to the cheap thrill of having some sort of power over other people's lives. But as the practice multiplies, 'poachers turned gamekeepers' (former hackers who work for manufacturers of anti-virus software and attend conferences organised by virus writers) are helping to flesh out this stereotype.
In order to understand more clearly what makes them tick, virus writers can be divided roughly into three camps. Nuisance-level viruses are generally written by smart, relatively privileged youngsters who eventually grow out of the habit. Their viruses are more an expression of technological and social experimentation, characteristic of their life stage, than because of any drive to do significant harm.
As one would expect among educated teenagers, they quickly lose interest when they come to recognise two things. First, that virus writing is regarded as child's play among the cyber-savvy, giving it a low 'street cred'. Second, the level of social daring involved is hard to control - the ramifications of nuisance viruses can sometimes have more serious effects than expected.
Life-stagers are therefore less threatening than the second category of virus writer: the protester. Protesters are people motivated by clearly delineated ideological, political, moral or religious beliefs. For them, writing a virus is an alternative mode of dissent or militancy. Sometimes their motivation can solidify or multiply support, like the Beijing and Spanish viruses that were written to broadcast and condemn the massacring of students, and telephone charges, respectively.
This category also includes fanatics who, some fear, may be moved to use viruses to disable essential facilities or to terrorise whole societies.
Finally, there are the hackers. They have neither the naivete of the life-stagers nor the ideological motivation of the protesters. They are closest to the stereotype: experienced, thrill-seeking, borderline criminals who take pleasure in flaunting mainstream standards of behaviour.