In late 2003 the University of Calgary announced their intentions to actually teach a course in virus writing (see earlier thread). It sparked a lot of controversy. The school's position was that the students would be better able to defend against malware and provide network security if they fully understood how a virus works. Many security experts argued that knowing how a virus works is not necessary to defend against it and that nothing good could come from such a course.

Fast-forward a year or so and the University of Calgary is at it again. They are expanding their malicious coding curriculum to include spam and spyware authoring. According to this article (University to Offer Email Spam Course) :

"The idea is for the students to learn how these things propagate, how they are created, how they interact with the system and that sort of thing," says John Aycock, who teaches the viruses course.

"Then we turn around and say, OK, here are these things you've created; now we write the anti-software and figure out how to fight against them."
Of course, most security experts still vehemently deny the value of learning how to write malicious code in order to defend against it. This blog site in particular has a strong opinion against such a course: Media Lies Blog

Thoughts or opinions from the cheap seats?