Young people who would not think of publicly saying some inappropriate thing will also, with very little forethought, say whatever to hundreds of thousands of people on Usenet. Another fundamental difference between Gordon and the average FBI profiler is that she doesn't use her knowledge to hunt down cyber-criminals. Gordon is part of a special team of experts at Symantec's AntiVirus Research Center, and works to build technological and educational safeguards that can deter cybercrime. There is no perfect technical fix to prevent viruses, and you cannot legislate against poor engineering. The bottom line is that computers don't write viruses, people write viruses.
Virus writing and hacking is an ethical issue.
Gordon, who works from her Florida home, typically spends 10 to 12 hours a day online, communicating with virus writers, hackers, and her peers in the antiviral industry, watching for trends and emerging threats and chatting with the writers about their motivations. She does a lot of hands-on technical work as well, to verify her findings and hunches. The research Gordon does is not just about figuring out what makes individual virus writers tick. She also explores their interactions with each other and the world at large. In inductive profiling, commonly shared individual characteristics of criminals are used to create a profile that can help identify unknown people who are committing similar crimes.