If the WikiLeaks dump, and the subsequent cyberattacks, have made anything clear it’s this: 2010 belongs to hackers.
Hacking, the practice of getting your hands on computer tools, systems and documents – especially when it’s unauthorized – is nothing new: from MIT students in the 1950s to “phreakers” who manipulated telecom systems around the globe.
But their impact has suddenly skyrocketed. Over the past decade, the digital medium in which hackers operate has become the single most important driver of cultural, commercial and geopolitical change in the world. And online, the limbs of everything from credit card companies to national security agencies lay far more unguarded than their real-world counterparts.
From easily obtainable cyberwarfare tools to being glorified in Stieg Larsson novels to jailbroken iPhones, hacker culture is also cycling from the underground to the mainstream."
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