High levels of education in certain areas of China and Russia plus a national broadband system and a government which may not support, but at least condones, computer crime against foreign nationals also lead to the majority of real threats originating from these areas.
Most hackers are young, under thirty. The reasons for this are uncertain, but it is known that their respective governments recruit the best and brightest hackers as part of their military. Hackers who own botnets, malware worms that infest many computers at once and allow the hackers to control them remotely, are usually in business for themselves, selling their services to the highest bidder. Services rendered by these botnet operators most commonly include money laundering and denial of service attacks. Other hackers are simply guns-for-hire, paid between $1,000 and $5,000 to compromise a specific computer. 
Hackers are often genius-level students who are creative and enjoy puzzles or challenges. Infiltrating a computer system often requires the hacker to practice on similar machines for many hours. In many cases, the hacker will read through the actual programming code that the machine uses until something sticks out as wrong. This is usually due to a programmer error, but these are often overlooked when many individual programmers work on a single piece of code. More novice hackers read the latest security reports from Microsoft and simply attack unpatched computers before the computers have a chance to install the updates. These programs are often distributed among the hacker community as ways to break into certain systems. Many of these programs are freely available on the Internet today for any novice interested in getting started as a hacker.
Some hackers do not attack the computer systems at all, preferring to manipulate the human behind the system instead. These hackers, known as social engineers, are usually behind most of the phishing and pharming scams on the Internet.
Hackers come in two varieties, called black hat and white hat. The black hat hackers are the criminal element, doing things that are illegal or immoral in order to make money or simply for vandalism. White hat hackers are often individuals hacking for the fun or the challenge with no intention to harm any of the computers they compromise. It’s proper etiquette in the white hat community to send instructions on how to patch the hole to the administrator of a compromised system via an email from his own account.
Since hackers fight on their own turf, most individuals stand little or no chance against them without relying on the security consultants who release the updates to their operating system, browser, and anti-virus software. Many white-hat hackers end up working as security consultants for organizations such as these.

The “Do Not Track” bill introduced in the House of Representatives would ban advertisers from tracking the behavior of users who opt-out of ad tracking for marketing purposes. 