After some explaining, the online gaming firm spent a month working with law enforcement officials to collect data on the hacker's activities so they could nab him. But in the end, the hacker eluded them. This person was very good at it. Berrios says he knows from direct experience that hard-core criminals are on the rise in the hacker community, which traditionally has preferred to view itself as a bunch of adventurous free spirits out to have fun. In fact, hackers are now getting paid to try to steal proprietary corporate data or military secrets, some claim.
Most hackers are kids, but there are professional hackers, the experienced ones.
Universities exposed No organization, not even a school as technically savvy as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is immune from the hacker menace. Stopping hackers is particularly hard in a university setting such as MIT, where students balk at anything that restricts user access to the Internet. MIT is hardly the first university to have to cope with hackers. Universities have long been exploited as hacker proving grounds. That's according to Seminole, Fla., security consultant Winn Schwartau, who says hackers are now e-mailing death threats to him, his family, his staff and even his neighbors.