Anyone care to enlighten me?

edit: I just reread the article... Let's see, Tom Anderson created MySpace, did war-dialing in the WarGames times, got access to the Chase bank system (apparently with a default or weak password), told 40 of his friends how to do it, and they all got raided simultaneously.

Public figure + black hat hacking in the past = interesting?

There's one thing I found really interesting:

"One of the reasons Anderson would hack into living room sized mainframe systems was to get access to computers that could run a C compiler to learn programming. There were no open source or free C compilers at the time, and personal computers had very limited memory and processing power, so hackers would try to access them on other systems."