No one is safe. Hackers also defaced the Justice Department web page with Nazi swastikas and pornography. Matt Yarborough, the federal computer crimes prosecutor for North Texas, said this is the crime of the millennium. More and more traditional modes of communication are going on line to the Web. Yarborough warns that hackers can steal confidential information about customers from unsecured websites, and businesses can lose millions of dollars in sales if hackers shut down those websites.
Any individual sitting at their keyboard can choose to hack.
Hundreds of hacker sites on the Internet make cyber burglary tools widely available. Some feature an international menu of programs to attack systems. They offer how-to manuals for beginners. One software program cracks the mathematical formula used by credit card companies, generating valid numbers that often pass security checks. There are many more highly sophisticated programs useful for stealing information.