Computer security expert Sarah Gordon is to the virus-writing underground what anthropologist Clifford Geertz was to the Balinese. Gordon has been quietly studying people who write computer viruses to understand more about their ethical development, perceptions of themselves and the world around them, and their motivations for releasing viruses into the wild.
Gordon's research began in the early 1990s, after she bought a used PC-XT that was infected with a virus called Ping_Pong. To get her machine running again, she began corresponding with virus writers on the Fidonet virus echo. "Most of them seemed ethical and perfectly normal," she recalls. "It made me curious to find out how people who were so helpful could see nothing wrong with programming a virus to destroy computer data." Drawing on her previous experience as a juvenile crisis counselor, Gordon surveyed virus writers to learn more about their interpersonal relationships, cognitive reasoning abilities, and ethical development.
After collecting data from more than 60 people, Gordon compared her results with ethical development models formulated by research psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg. Kohlberg's models show that ethical development normally progresses from an immature stage, to a mature, adult stage where individuals are able to define right and wrong through personal values and empathy for others. Placing her respondees into four categories that mirror part of Kohlberg's developmental framework, Gordon discovered that her subjects' behavior fit within the normal range of ethical development for their respective age groups: adolescent virus writers, college students, employed adults, and reformed virus writers. And while all her subjects were male, few virus writers fit the stereotypical image of the angry, antisocial geek.
Gordon published her findings in 1994, and she plans to update her research later this year. "It's easy to design new technology," she says. "It's not so easy to design the ethics for that technology."
SCANS
Among the Virus Thugs
