Hacking does not have the image it deserves. Hackers are not all 12 year old white kids who sit awake all night in their bedrooms logging on to government computers and trying lists of commonly used passwords until they get in (although some kids do this and call themselves hackers). There are much easier, advanced, interesting and less detectable ways of getting in - this is what real hackers do. Most hackers are young, males of high intelligence (Hey that sums me up just perfect - oh yeah and modest too) as the stereotype suggests but most often they are computer enthusiasts who are just surfing the net looking for new and interesting things to do and when they do find a harmful bug which could be exploited they attempt to fix these flaws (well the good guys do). Just check out the bugtraq mailing list for examples of the many white-hat hackers there are out there, who find the harmful bugs and then try to notify the system administators, programmers and other of them and any fixes they have come up with.

My advice if you want to learn how to hack is to learn from Carolyn Meinel's "Guides To Mostly Harmless Hacking" which are available at her website at http://www.happyhacker.org and the Happy Hacker Digest which she also publishes which you can subscribe to at the same website or just review the archives. Both of these series will soon be available on this page. If you search the net for information on "HOW TO HACK" (try it yourself on altavista) you will find loads of pages full of vague, out of date information which is useless to the newbie hacker. Although "newbie" is generally used as an insult to put down new hackers just remember everyone had to learn. Carolyn seems to be the only person out their with the balls (although she is a woman so it is probably not the best choice of words) to give up some of the so-called secrets of hacking and teach newbies what they need to know in order to get started on their way to becoming truly elite. I'm going to put some information that I find most useful on here but in order to learn the ways of the Computer-Jedi one must go to a master - and Carolyn seems to be one of the best.