It was the late 1980s, the era of VAXes and the NSFNET. Needing more disk space, one of our students hacked the account of a faculty member who was on sabbatical at another university. His exploits, which soon included computers from coast to coast, went unnoticed until the student forwarded an important but unread e-mail to the faculty member's sabbatical account. After explaining to the student the error of his ways and thanking him for his honesty in coming to the aid of our faculty member, we hired him.
In retrospect, perhaps our response should have been the same as the response to the plea, "Don't be afraid," in 1986 horror film, The Fly: "Be afraid. Be very afraid." Just as the lead character of the film, a brilliant but eccentric scientist, changed into something more malevolent than what he was before, so hacking has changed as well. While there are still lone hackers, motivated by the intellectual challenge, they have been largely supplanted by skilled teams whose objective is money, whose business model is organized crime, and whose scale is global. In the February 2006 issue of Business Week, Paul Horn estimated that 85 percent of malware today is created with profit in mind....