VX community speaks out about Melissa

The following statement is from a segment of the VX community who wish to clear their names and separate themselves from the media attention and chaos caused by the Melissa Virus. They wish for the "bad guy" image to be forgotten and hope to be appreciated for their computer research efforts:

The virus exchange (VX) community has been torn into chaos as a result of the release, infection and media coverage of the Melissa Microsoft Word Macro virus. Several "white hat" members of this community would like to improve their reputations and fix the damage that has been done while others speak of retaliation for causing the rift in the virus underground.

Virus programmers have a community similar to hackers. Some wear the "white hats" in that they are teachers, authors, and superior programmers working to expose possible security hazards that need to be fixed. Crackers or "black hat hackers" are the computer programmers who take these hazards often known as exploits and use them to break into machines, corrupting data and modifying Web sites.

The Virus community is primarily made up of programmers who write computer bugs and "exchange" these bugs amongst themselves. Sometimes one of these "black hat" programmers comes along and releases the virus into the wild through e-mail or Usenet newsgroups, infecting the general population.

The media and investigative authorities should not be so quick to condemn the author of the Melissa bug, instead they should be more interested in the person who released the bug which caused the spread of the virus. This particular bug was released in only two Usenet groups:alt.sex.passwords and alt.sex. It stands to reason that these two "releases" could not possibly have spread Melissa across the world. However, once released others posted the Melissa source code to additional newsgroups, Web sites and listserves, which meant anyone could turn it into the virus and continue to spread it.

Please do not turn this investigation into a Kevin Mitnik-like witch-hunt. The VX known as VicodinES has initially been blamed for the creation and spread of the Melissa Virus when in fact, he was not at fault. Ten years, the maximum sentence for this type of crime, is a long time for anyone to be in jail and in this case Melissa was actually a benign virus. It did not delete anything nor did it manipulate data.

It stands to reason that with the integration that MS Office has with the Windows operating system and the versatility of the Visual Basic programming language, this virus could have been a lot worse. With the continued integration of Windows and Office 2000, viruses will have access to more system resources and user dataand have the possibility to be a lot worse than Melissa. Melissa exposed a flaw in an operating system Microsoft wants to make us think as "secure".