Is black-hat hacking harder now than it was 20 years ago?
dnsworks: Absolutely. 20 years ago telcos didn't bother adding password protection to digital "switches" because they didn't even consider war dialers or the proliferation of internal documentation through bulletin boards. Unix vendors like Microsoft (Xenix), SCO, and Sun left password-less accounts (like Root, Operator, Sync) on workstations which were then immediately plugged into a shared-bus network. Not to mention  the wide-open nature of the various X.25 networks like Sprintnet which were used for inter-bank communications.