TOM BEARDEN: The popular perception of hackers is long-haired guys like you are talking about, who go out and do sometimes evil things. Is that an accurate perception?

Profile of a hacker.

JEFFREY SCHILLER: I think, you know, the long-haired guys who built the Internet were very different than the crackers, we like to call them crackers, but the problem we have with crackers is for the most part they are young, they are almost always male, between the ages of maybe 15 and 25. They are usually socially maladjusted. They are people who have discovered they can hide behind the apparent anonymity of a computer screen and take on a whole new life. You know, the short frail kid can be a he-man on the Internet and I think that really attracts a certain class of person and really brings out some of the worst characteristics that some people have. And that is very different from the very intellectually-focused, almost geniuses that helped build the Internet.

I mean these guys, most of the crackers we are dealing with are not experts, they are not very sophisticated. I would wager a significant amount of money that the guy who did this attack that hit MIT and Berkeley and a few other places didn't understand the program he was using. He probably found the program on the network and used it to attack places.

So it is real different culture that we are seeing in these guys. These are not the geniuses. These are the misfits.

TOM BEARDEN: The vandals?

JEFFREY SCHILLER: The vandals, yes.

TOM BEARDEN: Any sense of how many there might be out there?

JEFFREY SCHILLER: Hard to judge. For one thing, when you start seeing an attack, the first thing you don't know is this one guy doing this or is this three guys, five guys. We don't even know. I don't think anybody knows how many bad guys are really out there. My guess is, you know, it is probably numbered in between the hundreds and maybe the thousands. I doubt there is many much more than that, or you know, it wouldn't be up at all. But it is in that order.

When hackers attack.

TOM BEARDEN: I have heard some of these attacks being ankle bites, not serious. What is your view?

JEFFREY SCHILLER: Well, again, we have yet to have an attack that has really debilitated an institution. You know, sure, if somebody comes in and wipes out your hard disk that can be really bad if you don't have backups, but fortunately, most people have backups. Yes, it is an inconvenience, it is an ankle bite, it is a pain. But it is not earth shaking. You know, MIT was up and running the Tuesday after the attack, you know, nobody did anything but maybe type 3 more keystrokes, you know, the control-alt-delete, to restart their computer. And if we had a serious sustained attack, we would have put up defenses. We probably would have figured out how to stop it inside of maybe five hours. Five hours, that's a lot of time, but it is also not a lot of time. And we would be real well motivated to catch the guy who did it.

TOM BEARDEN: How hard is it to catch them?

JEFFREY SCHILLER: If they are dumb they can probably be found. I mean, the dumb ones, if somebody did this attack and did it over and over and over, well guess what. It means they are there. We know where they are coming from, or we can find where they are coming from. I mean if they are really, really smart, it might be very hard to catch them, but most of these guys aren't that smart. Most of them are pretty stupid.

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