Copycats. Expect them. Lots of them. The recent Love Bug episode will inspire a slew of kids to launch pranks into cyberspace with one goal in mind: notoriety. This may be fun for them, but the long-term implications are grim.

An odd article in the British online gossip publication The Register reported the case of a 15-year-old who tried to infect his school and insisted that he created the Love Bug virus. The kid was in England, and of course, all experts agree that the virus began its life somewhere on the Asian side of the Pacific Rim. No matter. Maybe he'll get a date with some easily impressed British schoolgirl. Or maybe not.

Given the way the law treats juveniles as opposed to adults, I suspect that it could become faddish and even "cool" to unleash some horrible viruses on the unsuspecting public--if you're 15. And let's not forget the newsworthiness of a well-executed denial-of-service attack either.

As computers move further into the social structure of Western economies, groups of kids who would normally be delinquents or just troublemakers will amuse themselves by using their new computers to create disruptions and cause havoc. And why not? It must be a thrill. After all, tagging someone's garage door with a can of spray paint or a magic marker doesn't get you on the NBC Nightly News.

Once some of the kids see the attention they can get, "bombing" computer systems could become a worldwide rage. Many of you will cringe at the notion, but I think this behavior is a darn sight better form of expression than shooting fellow students, which was starting to look like an ominous trend. Getting attention is one thing, but murder is not the best way to go about it.

Now I don't want to sound as if I'm encouraging kids to go out and write viruses or create denial-of-service attacks. I'm suggesting that the two most recent episodes and the coverage they received can't do anything but encourage copycat behavior. And I wonder how long it will be before racketeers see this as a business opportunity.

None of this could happen, of course, if the entire Internet and most of the software running on it weren't so poorly designed and vulnerable. You have to remember two things: The Net was originally designed for friendly academics and government people to send reports back and forth; and Microsoft has never paid much attention to security issues, because from the early days, the architecture of its software presupposed "personal" computing. That means one computer for one person, not this wacky shared networked environment with all its perils.

Let's go one step further and add organized crime to the mix. Where have all the wise guys been during all this Internet action? Have there been high-level extortion games played that have never been reported? If 15-year-olds can cause billions of dollars in computer and e-commerce damage, what can a skilled expert do?

And what about offshore cyber-terrorism? What would it take for Syria, for example, to round up some of the great network experts and pay them a few million to create the ultimate weapon in the form of code to bring down the Net? There is virtually no protection for this sort of thing.