Viruses damage property which belongs to someone other than the writer, so if they are damaging property of someone else, and that is against the law, do they not get punished for their actions? Viruses lead to many problems, including fraud, which is again against the law and the offender would be punished in any other situation.
Many businesses rely heavily on using a computer and a network to many other servers – and virus writers can lose many businesses lots of money, which could lead to the business failing in the long run. Viruses also mean that the servers or computers have to have maintenance which again will cost the business, but on top of this the business will have to halt their work whilst the work is undertaken.
The damage that a virus can cause can be anything from some spyware to viruses which erase system files and ultimately stop the computer from functioning. Another danger of this is that when someone receives a virus, the majority of the time they will accidently pass it on to people they have as contacts or people that they know.
The last time I had a virus was when someone on my Messenger list sent me a link which automatically opened when I received the message, this was then sent to everyone on my contact list, including my mum. This virus was caused by a virus writer hacking into Messenger and adding a malicious code – this code was programmed to make your computer freeze and when it was rebooted it had deleted many important system files and had taken any personal information that had been stored on the PC. It took a long time to try and fix this problem as virus scans couldn’t do anything about it, other than tell you the virus was there. In the end I had to reinstall both mine and my mother’s operating systems and then reinstall all of my programs. There were lots of files that were lost in the process and if this had happened to a business then they would have lost a lot of time and money trying to rectify the problem.
As technology grows, it will become more and more of a problem, and whilst it is not easy to catch the people who write viruses and inflict millions of pounds worth of damage over a long period of time I believe that more should be done to punish the people who intentionally try to damage others property. It is much harder to catch someone that commits a ‘virtual’ crime; however they still leave details out there to be caught, such as their IP Address and other details.
Additionally, many virus writers end up either working for computer security companies or writing codes for those companies, which in my opinion is worthless as the writer then knows exactly how to get into their own code and can then hack into anyone who uses that software. If a virus writer is writing codes which are meant to protect people, they must also know how to breach it, so surely I can’t be the only one who thinks that this is a bad idea?
Overall I don’t see why someone should be allowed to sabotage other people’s property and get away with it when other people are arrested for things like littering. Just because the crime isn’t psychical it is still a crime which affects people and causes damage to property. I do believe that more effort should be put in to protect people more adequately from virus writers, but more should be done to stop the crime being committed. There isn’t as much effort put in to catching virus writers as I believe there should be, however this isn’t to say that the offenders cannot be caught.
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