The latest hacker who got sentenced for 18months in USA instead of 10 years is Jeffrey Lee Parson has been charged with creating the Blaster worm (LovSan worm, also known as MS-Blaster.) that infected around 48,000 computers and caused $1.2 million in damage in 2003. Parson was lonely with irresponsible parents.
A quote from US District Judge Marsha Pechman based on Parson’s case that I consider it as a mark of how danger the Internet on a individual and society as a whole:
Other hackers or spammers do it for fun and other do it for challenge and they get thrilled for doing it. Vary few are professionals and the rest are amateurs. Amateurs mostly download free applications from the net that enable the professionals to access to their PC without knowing.
Some use hacking for political and personal reasons that affect the nation nationally and internationally that results terrorism both nationally and internationally too. An example for that is the Arabic and English news service ‘Al-Jazeera’ web site that was attacked during the Iraq war by an American, the reason was that the American hacker John William Racine II felt that Al-Jazeera is an anti-American broadcast.