Why hackers hack

In his autobiography, Nobel Laureate Luis Alvarez said that he believes that one trait that a good scientist has to have is a passion for finding answers, even if there are obstacles in their way. He said that they'll ignore a "KEEP OUT" sign on a door if they really want to know what's behind it. This also seems to be a defining trait of many information security professionals, some of which are probably even motivated by a "KEEP OUT" sign to do things that they wouldn't otherwise do. This was certainly true of old-school hackers, although it may not be the case anymore.

When I worked for the government, I once had a class in how to open locks and safes. The final exam for this class included opening a four-wheel safe lock, the case of which was protected by a tamper-evident holographic seal. The seal was probably there to keep you from opening the lock to find what its combination was, although that was never explicitly stated. We were just told that we had to open the lock within four hours.

I probably wouldn't have thought to open the lock's case if the seal wasn't there, but I took the seal to be an interesting challenge (I hadn't had that particular class yet) and decided to try to beat it. This turned out to much easier than actually opening a lock by manipulation, which is actually fairly tedious once you know how to do it, and I finished by test well ahead of schedule.

I wasn't trying to finish my test faster by bypassing the tamper-evidenet seal; I did it just because it was an interesting challenge. That outlook was common in old-school hackers, who took security as a challenge and typically didn't do anything malicious once they defeated whatever security mechanisms that they came across.

Today, however, hacking is big business, and many people who do it are motivated by money instead by the intellectual challenge that bypassing security mechanisms poses. These days, instead of just looking behind the door labeled "KEEP OUT" and thinking, ah, this stairway leads to the roof, people are doing the equivalent of blowing the door to the safe and taking the money that's in it. Curiosity isn't the driver any more. Now it's just greed.