Читать книгу Cybersecurity For Dummies - Joseph Steinberg - Страница 96

While script kiddies are technologically unsophisticated (see preceding section), plenty of other kids are not. For many years, the caricature of a hacker has been a young, nerdy male interested in computers, who hacks from his parents’ home or from a dorm room at college. In fact, the first crop of hackers targeting civilian systems included many technologically sophisticated kids interested in exploring or carrying out various mischievous tasks for bragging rights or due to curiosity.

While such attackers still exist, the percentage of attacks emanating from these attackers has dropped dramatically from a huge portion to a minute fraction of a percentage of all attacks.

Simply put, teenage hackers similar to those depicted in movies from the 1980s and 1990s may have been a significant force in the pre-commercial Internet era, but once hacking could deliver real money, expensive goods, and valuable, monetizable data, criminals seeking to profit joined the fray en masse. Furthermore, as the world grew increasingly reliant on data and more government and industrial systems were connected to the Internet, nation and states began to dramatically increase the resources that they allocated to cyber-operations from both espionage and military standpoints, further diluting the classic teenage hacker to a minute portion of today’s cyberattackers.