Is black-hat hacking harder now than it was 20 years ago?
jodrellblank: I have been fascinated with stories of really clever hacks into systems. I've also been told to setup a scheduled database backup and when I opened the first backup to check it was going to work, found unencrypted credit card and billing details (only a year or two ago). Only a few weeks ago I found a small company system which ships with a default admin password (a dictionary word, no less) which the end user cannot change. Weird.Putting two and two together, I suspect that some extremely clever hacks happened (and still happen, I guess), but many many more were probably fortuitous stumbling on horrible or utterly absent security in some overlooked corner; as per dnsworks comment, except - is logging into a password-less account really 'hacking'?