Ripped off, hacked and taken to the cleaners

Simon Hendry in the NZ Herald has some words of caution, and some helpful advice, on avoiding becoming another identity hacker's statistic.

Twenty years ago the typical hacker was a bedroom-based teenager with an IBM clone 386 PC, a dial-up modem, whose goal was to gain geek kudos by infiltrating and disrupting an unsuspecting corporate computer system. Today's more scary incarnation, says Owen Johnston of security company Blue Coat Systems, is a very smart IT graduate, probably living in Eastern Europe, who is in the hacking business to make money - lots of money.