Encryption
Yay you are all saying.  Time for some downright boring shit. Well Im just gonna have to say that if you wanna be a good hacker, you are gonna have to bear with me people!  Encryption is the art of scrambling something so it is hard for someone to use unless they know the password.  The most common program which people associate with encryption is probably PGP private key, a program which is designed mainly for the purpose of scrambling emails to prevent any people who might be listening/watching to be able to read it.  So far the highest encryption which has be broken is 128bit Triple DES, a type of encryption developed by the US government which was a pain in the for a while because foreign countries werent allowed to use it until recently.  There is also higher encryption but these have been so far unbroken!  The fastest that a 128bit Triple DES encrypted computer has been broken was by 5000 different computers around the world working in collaboration in one another in just about 36hours.  Since this was a contest, it would have been much easier then in real life.  The reason for this is that in the real world, the sysop would have discovered that there was a massive amount of connections and if his server hasnt crashed by all the log ons, he could even track you down!  Especially if you are connecting using a cellphone modem.  There is no way that you could possibly brute force a high security system  even if you had 30000 computers.  The reason for this would be because the Sysop (system operator) would catch you by then.  The only possible way of getting in would be if the password was really lame (ie only 5 or 6 characters) or if the secretary either tipped you off a lot or you managed to convince her to give it to you. The way the encryption works is called the algorithm.  Generally though the longer the algorithm, the harder it is to hack.  The example of commonly used encryption is on DVDs that prevented people from copying it.  However, thanks to a Swedish hacking team, they managed to crack the algorithm.  A program called Docss is now freely available on the net that allows you to copy them.  If you perform a major hack in the future, may I suggest that you encrypt any copied files (which came off the server) to save your ass?  I also suggest encrypting your emails at work to stop people reading them!  Windows 2000 has in-built support to encrypt files, but I personally wouldn't recommend it as it would probably be easy to hack.