Once upon a time..

As long as computers exist, there have been people around who find delight in taking apart, analyzing and modifying/rebuilding (new) technology to their own needs. At a certain point in history, this phenomena was called hacking. For example Linus Torvalds, the guy who reverse engineered the Unix kernel into the Linux kernel, is a kernel hacker.

But then, around 1995..

Suddenly the Internet started to become very popular and ever more often a news issue. journalists needed a label for their digital villians and mistook hackers for computer criminals (easy to explain, hacking sounds much scarier and mythical, you know, 'the unkown threat').

The real threat

The fact that those journalists score better ratings isn't even that big of a deal. The real issue is, lots of talented teens get obsessed by this myth, and want to become a 'hacker' to gain recognition and that costs us billions of dollars or euro's every year.

So what do I mean?

News people should be aware that a computer criminal is a criminal who uses a cheap exploit and not a hacker, it's time to wake up. That would save us allot of trouble.

Jonathan