[edrxty]

Looking back on that era, the hate towards hackers feels really misplaced. Yeah, at the time it was more local and more dominated by people doing it for the lolz but we kinda owe them a debt of gratitude. If they hadn't gotten everyone to stop being lazy about security we'd be in a very different place now, surrounded by rouge states and agencies launching hyper sophisticated attacks on infrastructure and data. That was also the era that trained the current generation of cybersecurity experts.

[pookha]

It wasn't misplaced...There were some horrific pieces of "hacker" software that were floating around in 05. Wasn't uncommon for a disgruntled employee to load malware onto a company's network and bring down operations for weeks. Case in point, douchebag loaded a maleware into this small financial company's network that I wound up working for. The virus infected the boot sector and forced the company to do low level formats on all of the company's hard drives. They lost immense amounts of money and respect in their industry and barely recovered. That virus was developed by some garbage hacker boy for laughs.

[edrxty]

In fairness, there aren't a whole lot of ways left to run around corrupting the boot sectors on an entire network. Given current politics I'd rather have everyone learn how to enforce user access control in '05 rather than in '23.