Quote Originally Posted by brokencrow
Knowledge...is power.

Hackers are essentially no different than anyone else. They only think they are.
Hi, that might have been true up until about 3 years or so, ago. Nowadays there are relatively few hackers and a lot more skiddies who couldn't hang ten lines of compilable code together.

They are like the "mules" of the drug trade............... in the food chain, but right at the bottom.

They mostly don't even want to be 1337 these days............ they want $$$$$ and a sense of "power". A bit like the "my knife is bigger than your knife" mentality in street gangs?

Look at what is going on these days?

1. Spamming
2. Identity theft
3. Fraud (e-bay etc)
4. Click fraud
5. Reversed click fraud (drop the competing target in the crap )
6. DoS
7. Soak up competitor's bandwidth
8. Soak up competitor's advertising budget
9. Stock pumping

To mention but a few. All of those are illegal activities, and are based in criminal intent rather than technical knowledge.

"The hacker is dead, long live the hacker"

I would suggest that part of the reason for these developments is that there is no real motivation to be a hacker, when you make no money out of it, yet face the same or worse punishment as/than the skiddies and their criminal puppeteers?