Not all hacking is criminal in intent or result. Hackers often end up going legit, setting up thriving security consultancies and catching their old hacker pals. Crackers often end up building one-room cabins in desolate parts of Montana near power and telephone lines. There is a lot of innovation that comes out of that. For one thing, computer security is greatly enhanced.
Many hacks are purely mischievous pranks.
But prosecutors are taking it a lot more seriously since President Clinton signed the Economic Espionage Act in October of 1996, making prosecution of computer crimes easier. The act was spurred at least in part by hacking that covered the Justice Department's site with swastikas and pornographic pictures in August and September, and replaced the Central Intelligence Agency's Web site files with spoofs. Reliable current estimates of the damage to business are devilishly hard to come by since the majority of execs in the survey said they would not report any hacking damage anyway. The number one goal of malicious hacking is industrial espionage, the WarRoom survey concluded, with theft of funds, passwords, and data also reported. Many firms simply are not aware of the security risks.