The media is largely conflating two very different definitions of "hacker" here. There's a big difference between the people who jailbreak hardware and the people who steal credit card data. The former is arguably legal and moral, the latter is neither.
The type of hacker that brought down PSN and stole credit card data needs no motive other than the millions of dollars of credit fraud that will follow. They need only opportunity.
Motivation aside, there's pretty strong parallels between breaking into the PSN, and breaking into the PS3 hypervisor. Obviously the hypervisor was a much harder nut to crack and GeoHot is likely far more skilled than the PSN people, but he's basically a grey hat systems cracker.
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The media is largely conflating two very different definitions of "hacker" here. There's a big difference between the people who jailbreak hardware and the people who steal credit card data. The former is arguably legal and moral, the latter is neither.
The type of hacker that brought down PSN and stole credit card data needs no motive other than the millions of dollars of credit fraud that will follow. They need only opportunity.
Motivation aside, there's pretty strong parallels between breaking into the PSN, and breaking into the PS3 hypervisor. Obviously the hypervisor was a much harder nut to crack and GeoHot is likely far more skilled than the PSN people, but he's basically a grey hat systems cracker.