Computer viruses are not accidents and cannot create themselves. It
takes a human being to create a computer virus. These people
deliberately create a program that when unleashed on an unsuspecting
computer or networking system will either play a prank or possibly
render the computer useless. Now that we know that for a computer virus
to exist, someone had to have created it, let’s explore the “why”. Why
do people create computer viruses?

-Computer viruses are created for a number of reasons and by a number of
different types of people:

-Viruses may be created by the computer programming student who, as an
assignment, has to create and then combat a virus of his own making.

-They may be created by the “scam artist” as a way to hijack the
installed web browser and force it to open up web pages of it’s
choosing.

-Viruses have been written as research projects with an aim towards
stopping similar viruses.

-They may be created by the activist who is attacking a certain company
or type of company, whether exploiting a computer company’s software to
give them a bad name or to further a social cause.

-They may be created by the prankster who is just trying to play a joke
on someone and inadvertently causes major trouble.

-Some virus writers even consider their creations to be almost works of
art amongst their peers, showing them off on “underground” message
boards.

-And they of course are created for personal and financial gain using
identity theft among other strategies.

-There are the rare instances of “good viruses” being written and
spread. Their goal is usually to track down other computer viruses and
monitor or delete them. Usually these are not truly “good viruses”
anyway as they still consume system resources and can be altered into
“bad viruses” fairly easy.

Of late, law enforcement has been catching up to more and more virus
writers every year. With the amount of money at risk if a larger
corporation’s computer network gets shut down because of a virus, the
justice system has been upping the penalties for spreading computer
viruses. Luckily, though computer viruses have come a long way in the
last few years, so has Internet security (firewalls, DSL, anti-virus
programs). Couple these tools with good old common sense and you may
just win this “historic” battle.