The New York Times has a long article on The Virus Underground. It points out the differences between virus writers, the guys who do it to learn more about computers and how viruses work; and script kiddies, people who just download the code, pretend they wrote it, and set it loose on the net to cause trouble. The virus writers say they\’re not doing anything wrong cause they\’re not actually spreading the viruses.

We may have created the monster, they\’ll say, but we didn\’t set it loose. This dodge infuriates security professionals and the police, who say it is legally precise but morally corrupt. \’\’When they publish a virus online, they know someone\’s going to release it,\’\’ says Eugene Spafford, a computer-science professor and security expert at Purdue University.