Last year there was a meme going around in the German hacking scene when Google received Pwnie’s “lamest vendor award” for closing 11 zero-days. The reason for that award is that western intelligence agencies abused these exploits for “counterterrorism operations”, so Google essentially shut down a whole spying op.

The joke about it was that closing security holes is never “lame”, and that the American hacking scene consists to a large extent of FBI, NSA or CIA, which explains the award.

To quote Felix von Leitner [1]: “They can say “Ex-“ a hundred times, but you won't get rid of the stench by declaring the termination of your employment.”

[1] http://blog.fefe.de/?ts=9c0bef46

The quote you're replying to is from one (admittedly, from several years ago). It does seem to be getting rarer, but consider that the ones still active might not want to make themselves publicly known.

Don't some people make a living solely off bounty hunting..? Please don't shatter my reality like that

I dunno, doesn't Crimew fit the bill?

There definitely still is... But I think after circa 2012 when people found out the Anonymous movement was just a cia/fbi Honeypot, no grass roots hacker groups publicly advertise.

To be honest this sounds like something the screenwriters might have given as a line for "the plague" in Hackers (1995), the movie.