Oh hang on a bit - they might be all those nasty things you call them, but take a step back for a minute, they are also pretty good thinkers & developers, albeit for the wrong reasons.

Without them and their sort, security professionals would be sitting on their backsides believing the internet is Utopia and all is well in cyberspace - now these people come along and throw a curly one into the mix, suddenly the security industry has to sit up, take notice and defeat them - end result - more secure operating systems for all of us to use..... hey Windows 95 and the Linux kernel 1.0 isn't all that secure after all !!

I am not taking away the fact that this can be a right royal P.I.T.A when they release a new virus/trojan and if you were a sysadmin for a network that gets taken down - yeah, you have every right to scream, yell and curse and want to mete out cruel, evil, violent death on them. At the end of the day when all is fixed you have a more secure network and you have no doubt learnt something from the experience apart from the fact that Prozac and Valium really do work !!

I don't want anyone to think that I accept this as an excuse for them releasing crap onto the internet - but face it, its a fact of life like death and taxes - its going to happen, like it or not these ceative little menaces are here to stay. Its a case of being prepared, developing a good recovery plan for when it does happen.

On the bright side, they are creating thinkers and developers on the good guys side as well and spawning a whole new generation of security professionals and software developers that need to think outside the box when creating new OS's or applications and take security seriously - so not all is doom and gloom.

Evil, without a doubt but like a lot of things in this world, a necessary evil.