Black hat down: What happened to the world's most famous hackers?

Hackers can be any shape, size, color, and creed, but they are all graced with a level of mental acuity that mere mortals simply do not possess. Physically, they are rarely exceptional. Philosophically and morally, they can vary from ultra-conservative to bleeding-heart liberal. Even by nature and nurture, there is no obvious way to discern whether someone will become a hacker or not.

But there is something that sets hackers apart from normal people. Hackers see things differently, and they tend to have a very different view of how the world and its constituent parts are put together. Instead of merely accepting something as true or workable or ideal, a hacker needs to know the why; a hacker needs to tear the construct apart until he can look upon the constituent parts and decide for himself how and why it works  — or, as the case may be, why it doesn’t work.

Hackers exist in almost every technological arena, too. Computer hackers (sometimes referred to as crackers) — the kind who break into the Pentagon — are by far the most common in popular culture, but there are software hackers (programmers), gadget and consumer electronics hackers (hobbyists), and more. Generally, if you put someone with a hacker mindset in the vicinity of an object that can be hacked — which is almost everything — then it will be hacked, either for the forces of good… or evil.