But other countries systems are another matter, because of the promise of great gain and potentially little risk of being caught. (Caryl, par. 8).
Even though the theft of money is a growing problem, there are other things for hackers to steal. For instance, hospitals have very elaborate network security setups. Why? Many hackers attempt to gain access to people's personal medical files in order to blackmail them, or to avenge some injustice by spreading the person's health problems around. (Scheir, par. 17) Other possibilities might go as far as to include looking up a patient's current location, in order for gang members to finish off the survivor of a drive-by shooting or other attempted murder. (Scheir, par. 10) It is for these reasons that medical facilities computer security procedures are second only to the government's. .
There are even more forms of hacking to go into. One type, called phreaking, is often a side-effect of a computer hacker's work. (Machlis, par. 8) Phreaking is the manipulation of phone lines and phone services. Over the space of a few years in the early eighties, hackers learned how to make free phone calls, bounce their line around to other places to avoid traces, even damage equipment at the other end of the line. Using the process of phreaking, hackers can anonymously and untraceably link themselves to remote systems, no matter how far away, without incurring long distance charges.
Combating hackers is a very expensive process. It is estimated that in 1997 a total of $6.3 billion dollars will be spent on computer security. (Lohr, par. 1) A great deal of this will go to protect against computer viruses. A computer virus is a very small program that can clone itself at will, over disks and phone lines, and usually causes some devastating impact on the target, such as deleting files, or even damaging the computer. Just like human viruses, such as AIDS, which changes form constantly to avoid destruction, some computer viruses, called polymorphic viruses, change slightly so that any previous anti-virus software will no longer detect it.