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began programming everything from games to a graphic user interface. When it came time for college, scrounging enough money for just the application fees was a real problem. Like Shawn, Ritter wanted to go to Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh, which had exceptionally strong music as well as computer science, and he was admitted with a small scholarship. But his parents directed him to Lehigh University, which awarded him a larger grant and was nearer to his successful uncle Don.

Ritter left for Lehigh in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, at seventeen, taking his computer with him on the Greyhound bus. Soon he grew bored with the computer courses and decided to work one summer at the lab of Terrance Boult, eventually managing the systems for the man who was founding chairman of Lehigh's computer-science department. "He's my god," Ritter said. "He turned me on to [free computer operating system] Linux, using free software. He turned me loose and trusted me." If Ritter appreciated his mentor's trust, he didn't always keep his end of the bargain. One Friday night, after smoking a nontrivial amount of marijuana, Ritter used a cable modem to take down three thousand university computers in about six minutes.

During Ritter's freshman year, his father died after open-heart surgery. When Ritter returned to college, school seemed less vital. He began spending more time online in hacker collectives, especially a group called Asylum. Like the shifting allegiances of soldiers in Afghanistan or spies in Vienna between the wars, the communities of hackers and security professionals are surprisingly porous. Ritter wasn't atypical in protecting Lehigh's computer system by day and taking it or other networks down by night. While there are plenty of white-hat security workers and black-hat malicious hackers, who assault large networks like Yahoo! for the thrill of it, the majority of people are in the middle, gray hats who create their own ethics. The debates within groups and among them are legion, and those arguments can be complicated by the entrepreneurial aspirations of the practitioners. Hacking for its own sake can be educational and amusing, a power trip for a bored but clever teen. One way to turn that skill into extra income is to publicly reveal a hole in a system, then offer a "patch" to fix it. The demonstration of expertise can lead to security jobs. But the timing and the publicity of the security two-step can change everything. If you just tell the company of the problem, implicitly

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