This Easter saw Matcher - a locally developed e-mail worm - bring chaos to the Internet. Matcher is not the first virus to come out of SA, although it is one of the more disappointing ones, using Melissa as a template rather than breaking new ground.
[VIDEO]The Durban and Pretoria viruses are both well-known South African creations. According to one source, the Durban virus was never supposed to be released. It was so infectious that the creator mistakenly gave his programming experiment to a friend on a floppy disk - without any knowledge that the virus had infected the disk.
Virus writing, hacking and phreaking (fiddling with the telephone infrastructure for various results - most notably to make free phone calls) have in the past been popular South African pastimes. The lack of legislation regarding most of these pursuits has made it a fairly safe environment to raise a group of skilled, equipped and dangerous security experts.
Rather than being a detriment to the country, the skill-set that has been developed in the hacking community has had some significant results. SA is recognised as one of the foremost pockets of computer security experts, with many South African ex-hackers using their knowledge of security to help close the holes they used to exploit.
Others have remained on the darker side of IT, becoming industrial hackers, for hire by companies to throw a few hurdles in their competitors` paths, or simply steal corporate secrets for competitive advantage. One skilled and infamous hacker that I met two years ago was tasked with cracking the GSM encryption, allowing his employer to track people`s movements through their cellphones.
Rather than being a detriment to the country, the skill-set that has been developed in the hacking community has had some significant results.
Jason Norwood-Young, Technology editor, ITWeb
Most of the local industrial hackers that I know of have immigrated to countries where their skills are more in demand, leaving SA in a position of security. We have good anti-hacking skills, and fewer active hackers.
Virus writers also seem to be a dying species in this country. While there used to be a strong virus-writing skill-set in SA, the culture seems to have diminished, with Matcher the first serious virus appearing to originate locally for many years, and it didn`t exhibit the imaginative coding of a past era of viruses.
I wonder if the increasing lack of interest in hacking and virus-writing will benefit the country, or whether SA will eventually lose its foothold in the security market.
Hacking may not be an immediately beneficial path into the IT market, but the understanding of internal computing systems that it promotes, as well as the insights into IT security, are skills not taught in school.
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