The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act was created in 1986 to deal with increasing hacks and break-ins. Hackers such as Kevin Mitnick and, a few years later, Kevin Poulsen, were already making names for themselves as serial hackers with criminal intent. Congress had made it a crime to break into computer systems and the Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) was created in 1987 to address issues in network security. The exploits of hackers began to seem increasingly sinister and, with the proliferation of personal computers, more destructive to a wider variety of people. In 1988 Robert Morris Jr. famously released a self-replicating worm that would come to be known as the "Morris worm." Morris was a graduate student at Cornell University at the time and son of a chief scientist for the National Security Agency. He released the worm on Arpanet to test its effect on UNIX systems and it got out of hand, spreading to over 6,000 computers. Morris was dismissed from Cornell, sentenced to three years' probation and fined $10,000. In the 1990's the arrest and sentencing of hackers escalated and has never really abated since.

Hackers are being indicted left and right for everything from breaking into the databases of major companies and stealing credit card numbers to breaking into the admissions records of major universities to hijacking the websites of Yahoo, eBay, and Amazon. From the inception of hacking in the 1950's up into the 1990's it had been a difficult task to assess what was and was not considered criminal in cyberspace. Taylor notes that "Elements of the computer security industry vehemently oppose both the 'playpen attitude' advocated by elements of the computer underground and also their apparent unwillingness to equate computer crime with real-world illegality" (136). Many hackers, especially teenage hackers, seem to have the mentality that they should hack simply because they can. They have discovered, through ingenuity, ability, and technological cunning, holes in the system. They have uncovered portals to government websites, phone systems, and major companies. In their minds, why shouldn't they exploit these, if the institutions are careless enough to allow them to be broken into?

Hackers are generally understood to be a different type of criminal: smart, skilled, and sly. As Taylor proffers in Cybercrime, "In the post Cold War world new security fears increasingly centre around the threat posed by cyber-terrorists yet the corollary also exists: the tacit pride felt in one's own electronic cognoscenti" (53). Philip Reitinger suggests, "we see the Internet often portrayed as either a freewheeling marketplace of ideas and information in which the best inherently excel, or a 'wild west' overrun and effectively controlled by technologically sophisticated villains of all sorts" (149). This mentality is arguably still in existence in 2005 and society as a whole has yet to really develop a consistent attitude toward hackers.