> From: Richard Loosemore [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > > I can answer this for you, because I was once an anti-virus developer, > so I have seen the internal code of more viruses than I care to think > about. > > The answer is NO. Malicious hackers are among the world's most stupid > programmers. > > We used to joke that it would only take one hacker with the same > programming skills that *we* had to bring down every machine on the > planet. It was (and still is) a chilling thought. >
This may be true for MOST of your malicious hackers. But certain organizations employ professional hackers for various reasons. I was employed by a telecommunications service provider in R&D for a couple years where a large part of my job was to devise and implement ways to hack and bypass foreign countries' telecom systems in order to offer various services that were illegal in that particular country but were legal in the US. One example was internet access in China/Mongolia in mid 1990's. There were two of us and we actually came up with and implemented some really neat schemes. Some of the schemes involved hardware design, some involved other technologies that I better not elaborate but the point is that what is illegal or of shaky legal grounds today may be perfectly legal tomorrow and there are some substantial resources behind the scenes working on things. Certain botnets probably have some smart cookies working on them as the potential is huge. John ----- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=69793090-3baee2
