COBOL Exploits

[mrockman at acm.org (Mark Rockman)]

The adolescent minds that engage in "exploits" wouldn't know COBOL if a printout fell out a window and onto their 
heads.  I'm sure you can write COBOL programs that crash, but it must be hard to make them take control of the 
operating system.  COBOL programs are heavy into unit record equipment (cards, line printers), tape files, disk files, 
sorts, merges, report writing -- all the stuff that came down to 1959-model mainframes from tabulating equipment.  They 
don't do Internet.  What they could do and have done is incorporate malicious code that exploits rounding error such 
that many fractional pennies end up in a conniving programmer's bank account.
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