Hackers are jerks.

I wish the news media would stop romanticizing hackers. There are two kinds of hackers. The first variety are thieves, the second variety are juveniles of all ages with a roaring case of Asperger's, or as they are sometimes known, basement dwellers.

The news media labels certain hacker groups as "hacktivists," Anonymous being the most well-known. Anonymous is best known for breaking into Sony's Play Station Network a couple of years ago and stealing millions of credit card numbers. They were romanticized as some kind of geeky David taking on the evil corporate Goliath, Sony. Stupid. They didn't steal from Sony, they stole from us. In that, they are no better than a common burglar. They are lesser known for taking down Freedom Hosting on TOR last year. Freedom hosting was home to a huge amount of illegal pornography. Their aim appeared to be noble, but who made them the Internet police? Their motto is, "We do what we want because we can." Their avatar is the Guy Fawkes mask from the movie "V." Not noble. Just belligerent.

This past weekend a group calling themselves, "Lizard Squad" launched a DDOS attack on the Sony Play Station Network and Microsoft's XBox Live. They also twittered a bomb threat against the President of Sony. This group is of the second variety. Their attack had no purpose other than to gain bragging rights. They didn't hurt Sony or Microsoft, and as far as anyone knows, they weren't able to steal anything. The only thing they did was annoy a bunch of gamers. So they were just a bunch of jerk-offs with too much time, and probably money on their hands. An attack that size is more than you can do with a PC botnet. These guys had to have some serious server horsepower and big network pipes.

Hackers aren't cool. They aren't mysterious or exotic. They aren't even very tech-savvy. They know a few things about system weaknesses and how to exploit them. They have about a half-dozen hacks in their bag of tricks, and all they do is put them together in various ways. Think about it. Their number one tool is called a brute force attack, which consists of trying as many passwords as they can until they find someone who used their grandmother's birthday or the name of their cat. Not elegant. Not exotic. Just brain-dead thumping and taking advantage of something stupid someone else did.