Hackers steal US govt, corporate data from PCs  
  
BOSTON, July 17 (Reuters) - Hackers stole information from the U.S. Department of Transportation and several U.S. companies by seducing employees with fake job-listings on advertisements and e-mail, a computer security firm said.

This article is great. It’s thorough, and complete, but you incorrectly lable the perpetrators as ‘hackers’ instead of ‘crackers’.

Bill E.

We heard from a number of readers on this one, and we are aware that this is a sore subject among insiders who distinguish between hacking  and cracking. 

However, it seems the battle to protect the H-word was lost some time ago. For example, American Heritage Dictionary offers this as a definition of hacker: “One who uses programming skills to gain illegal access to a computer network or file.”

And, to borrow from our competition, the Associated Press Stylebook says: “In common usage, the term has evolved to mean one who uses computer skills to unlawfully penetrate proprietary computer systems.”

GBU Editor