Why are people so malicious and misuse technology?

[thrasher6900]

Viruses, telling people to use commands that will do damage instead good, hacking.

What's the point?

Why do harm to someone you don't even know?

Why do people on here deceive new users on here with commands that will ultimately mess up their system?

Why make viruses? What's the point in harming someone? I mean there are people, like myself, who can't just go out and buy a new computer because someone thought it to be fun to fry it.

I understand doing such as 'vigilantism' toward predators, stalkers, people who try to download perversions like child porn(I have always thought it would be neat to be able to label telebubbies and the like as such and attach a little something to it and upload it on limewire lol)

So why do it? I could see the benefits of it from an unethical standpoint(hacking bank account ect) but why victimise someone who offers no benefit?

I've been attacked many times. I cannot even run xp without something popping up and causing problems. Not even having multiple firewalls and scanners can even catch the most damaging of these things.

I've even had been redirect to pages that say they 'require this plugin' in order to play such and such flash game/video/ect and it ended up being a virus that would even shut down the firewall before it can even run.


To me, this is total idiocy on the part of just wasting ones knowledge for harm when they could very well do the opposite.

What about 'hacking' people's computers just to find bugs and fixing them and sending a note pad letting them know. If 'hacking' is fun, then why not 'hack' people for their benefit.

I would love to be chatting with someone on messenger or something of the like and be able to tell them 'hey you have this and this but I fixed it for you' if I had such computer geniusey. It still gives the same element of surprise, but is a good deed at the same time.

[bufsabre666]

oh what strange creatures these mortals be

i agree it is kinda sick but i dont see it stopping anytime soon

[ZarathustraDK]

You could say the same of biological vira. They're pretty meaningless when it comes to their existence, they're not even able to move by themselves, doesn't have independent thought etc. Yet they kill millions every year.

From an evolutionary point of view though, they serve to select harshly against a given population, thus furthering its evolution into a better adapted species.

Same goes for software I guess, although vira seems to be putting the pressure on XP to a degree it will eventually go extinct :)

[squidfaceExtreme]

Why do people kill each other? Why do people start fights with and shoot people they've never met? Why do people commit crimes? It's a bit of a pointless question, really.

[pmlxuser]

the definition of a genius
->a person of great intelligence, who shows an exceptional natural capacity of intellect, especially as shown in creative and original work.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genius

creating viruses and stuff like that also shows how a genius a person is coz
"Geniuses are often accused of lacking common sense, or emotional sensitivity."http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genius

so don't balme a genius all you can do is cartch up thats why other geniuses provide us with patches (how would you know how to make a patch if you don't know how to creat a virus), How do you prevent hackes from hacking other peoples systems if you don't know how to hack?

[Bigtime_Scrub]

Those hacking attacks were supposed to be used on other people who were 1337 as a sort of game, to see who could one up the other. I dont know how it ever got so out of control. I guess with knowledge comes the responsibility of using it ethically. Our tech has advanced farther than our morality.

[Acglaphotis]

That's just the nature of humans. I don't think you can rationalize it.

[Mazza558]

Why attack people? Why go on a rampage with various weapons? Why fight people?

The truth is, every society, no matter how good or bad, how many policemen, how many CCTV cameras, and how civilised it is, will always have a small part of the population who, for whatever reason, wants to commit crimes. It just so happens that this also applies to computers too.

EDIT: Just noticed someone above already posted something very similar. Oops.

[aysiu]

There could be any number of reasons.

The first person who went on a malicious command rampage on these forums tried justify it as "Now new users know not to just copy and paste commands blindly," as if she or he had some kind of moral obligation to destroy people's computers. A bit like going into a peaceful town and becoming a serial killer to convince the town it needs police.

Just as soldiers are sometimes conditioned to dehumanize the people they kill in order to make the killing easier, I'd guess people who create malware also tend to think of the damage they do as just computers or bits and bytes instead of people's lives and precious information.

Or there could be a kind of "survival of the fittest" snobbery mentality to it: if I'm smart enough to create this malware, and they're dumb enough to get infected by it, they're not fit to use a computer.

Possibly the malware creators enjoy, as some serial killers do, a little bit of notoriety and want a little fame of sorts, especially if their malware gets a lot of press.

Or maybe they're just evil people who want to hurt others.

It could be any number of reasons.

[buntunub]

9 times out of 10 its always about criminal exploitation. Computers and the Internet are the new back alleyways for most of the worlds nefarious operations now. These people use these malicious tools for as many reasons as there are different types of large scale crimes. Dont leave out espionage and activities like that as well that some governments invest Billions in. 99.9% of these malware target Windows machines, but should Linux adoption grow, its status of being "Malware free" will definitely change. This is actually a reason some cite for wishing GNU/Linux to never go above its current adoption levels.

[koenn]

There is nothing inherently malicious about creating a virus. It's a programming exercise with quite a few interesting challenges :


- you need to create code that is able to reproduce itself, i.e, to create a fully functional copy of itself
- you need to create a program that is capable of traveling to other systems
- you need to find a way for the program to be executed and run without user intervention
- ideally, you're program needs to avoid detection (eg through encryption, self-modifying code, stealth, ... )
- preferably, your program is not just a piece of self-reproducing, travel-capable, detection avoiding code, but it can also execute arbitrary code (the so-called 'payload')

Depending on the approach you take to solve those problems, there are additional challenges, e.g. if you're virus tries to get executed by sitting in the boot sector of a floppy disk, you only have so much space so there's a limit to the size of your program, plus you need tomake sure that the original boot sector still works, or you're not getting anywhere.

So there's nothing malicious about writing viruses as such.

[karellen]

Why do people kill each other? Why do people start fights with and shoot people they've never met? Why do people commit crimes? It's a bit of a pointless question, really.

yeap. pointless....or very meaningful and scary - you know, the inherently savage human nature, carelessness, egotism and such...