Virus writer denies 'girl power' claim

The teenaged female virus writer who recently made headlines with a virus that targeted the .Net platform has hit back at claims that 'girl power' was the motivation.

Seventeen year-old Gigabyte, who coded Sharp, the second ever proof of concept virus to affect the .Net platform, has denied claims that she was using her virus writing ability to fight against sexism in IT.

"Writing Sharp to fight against sexism? Girl power? Heh. As if I'd bother," she wrote in an email to vnunet.com. "It's not on me to stand up for females in the computer world; that's something everyone's gotta do for themselves."

Gigabyte was apparently somewhat miffed at media articles about the Sharp virus making a point of her gender. She was quoted as saying: "I want to let people (and especially guys) know there are girls out there who like computers, and for more than games.

"Yeah, I did say that as an answer to a question related to my homepage. It certainly wasn't an answer to: 'Why did you write Sharp?'"

Gigabyte added that making it look as if girl power was her reason for writing viruses is "nonsense".

"If it was, don't you think I would've done it earlier?" she said. "I've been into virus writing for quite a while ya know. Also, if these were my reasons, I would've mentioned something about sexism in the virus itself."

The virus writer maintained that her motivation is a love of coding and curiosity for new programming languages such as Microsoft's C# platform for the .Net project.

"I write viruses because I like coding, and don't wanna practice by writing stupid 'hello world' type programs," she explained. "Why C#? Same reason I wrote Logo.Logic - to write in a language that hasn't been used for virus writing before. And outta curiosity for the new language."

Gigabyte also claimed that her creations are strictly in the proof of concept arena. "My viruses ain't destructive, especially not this one. It ain't in the wild either, if we should believe antivirus people," she said.