Hacker pirates: finally, we live in the future!<p>Aside from that though, I wonder if we'll be seeing increasing criminal activity like this or if it'll stay as an occasional source of funny headlines.<p>On the one hand the resources and knowledge of how to compromise a server are more accessible all the time.<p>On the other, exploited vulnerabilities are patched and the walls stay a bit higher than the cheap ladders. This will pretty much ensure that there is almost always at least a non-trivial amount of learning that needs to be done in order to profitably compromise equipment for practical purposes.<p>I'm thinking that the prevalence of basic technical savvy (roughly "has strong google-fu in the service of troubleshooting" or better) is going to be the largest influence on whether hacking-augmented crime increases or not.<p>My logic here is that it would happen more if more criminals knew how to go about learning how to hack since that gap between pre-built tools and practical application is always going to be there, but it's certainly bridgeable with some curiosity.<p>More technically savvy population, more cybercrime. It makes sense, but it can also be used as a kind of fluency metric. I thereby propose the frequency of computer-aided criminal activity as a fraction of all criminal activity to be a target metric for US technology education, higher is better.