“Rieback’s paper “Is Your Cat Infected with a Computer Virus?” suggests computer viruses could spread from RFID tags through readers into poorly written middleware applications and into enterprise backend systems and databases. Rieback “artificially” created a virus, rather than find vulnerabilities in a deployed RFID system. Industry reaction, while fast and furious in some cases, proved mixed. “With respect to the students involved, the paper as presented is rather weak,” said Kevin Ashton, ThingMagic Inc. vice president, and co-founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Auto-ID Center. “The ‘real’ virus, they claim to demonstrate in the paper, is not a virus, just a self-replicating piece of SQL code.””