Just because I haven't seen it mentioned I thought it'd be worth mentioning...

One of the most common reasons I hear about for personal machines being hacked, is due to a shared interest in an internet based game. Or more specifically due to offending someone who plays the same online games...

Back when I was playing EverQuest - or EverCrack as we more commonly called it i heard of hundreds of players getting their machines hacked/cracked in one way or another. I personally even knew one person whose machine got owned to the point the cracker even popped up a dialog box on the persons machine to talk smack to him - even going so far as to tell him what 'group' had hired him to do the cracking - before trashing his PC to the point of needing to reformat.

Poor guy hadn't followed my advise of installing zonealarm - I had been preaching on multiple of group's game boards about the importance of running a firewall, he just happened to be the only one who found out first hand why...

I hear about many occurances very similar to this revolving around other internet based games also...

RRP