Even though much of the world's business, political, and social life is carried on by computer, most people who use computers have little understanding of how they actually work. Computer hackers, on the other hand, seem to possess the keys to understanding and controlling computers that many computer users lack. Admired by some, hated by others, and feared by many, hackers are part of an intellectual subculture whose members love computers and also love the challenge of breaking into computer security systems, often simply to prove it can be done.

Though the term "hacker" has been used for several decades to label those who illegally break into computer systems, it was first used in the mid-1960s at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to mean a highly skilled computer addict. Hacking in its modern sense first became widely known in 1985, when the movie War Games introduced a...