Zero Tolerance (1994-present)
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Seeing Mitnick being led off in chains on national TV soured the public's romance with
online outlaws. Not users were terrified of hackers using tools like "password sniffers"
to ferret out private information, or "spoofing," which tricked a machine into giving a
hacker access.
Call it the end of anarchy, the death of the frontier. Hackers were no longer considered
romantic antiheroes, kooky eccentrics who just wanted to learn things. A burgeoning online
economy with the promise of conducting the world's business over the Net needed protection.
Suddenly hackers were crooks.
In the summer of 1994 a gang masterminded by a Russian hacker broke into Citibank's
computers and made unauthorized transfers totaling more than $10 million from customers'
accounts. Citibank recovered all but about $400,000, but the scare sealed the deal. The
hackers' arrests created a fraud vacuum out there in cyberspace.