let's be careful out there:
Criminal hackers _are_ stupid (like most criminals) for purely economical reasons: those who are smart can make more money in various legal ways, like by holding a good job or running their own business. Hacking into other people's computers does not pay well (if at all).
that depends on how you look at "hacking in". if bypassing spam filters and writing files (mail messages) on someone else's computer (inbox) is a form of "hacking in", then unfortunately it pays pretty well. if writing and propagating worms that create open proxies inside other people's computers so that you or others can use them to bypass spam filters is a form of "hacking in" then this too seems to pay pretty well these days.
Those who aren't in that for money are either psychopaths or adolescents, pure and simple. Neither of those are smart.
i wish you were right. i wish you were even close to right. but we've been attacked many times over the years by some extremely smart adolescent psychopaths -- where adolescence is a state of mind in this case, rather than of years -- and i wish very much that they would either stop being so smart, or stop being so psychotic, or stop being so adolescent.
The real smart ones - professionals - won't attack unless there's a chance of a serious payback. This excludes most businesses, and makes anything but a well-known script-based attack a very remote possibility.
that's just not so. ask me about it in person and i might tell you stories.
For most other people a trivial packet-filtering firewall, lack of Windoze, and a switch instead of a hub will do just fine.
this part, i agree with. -- Paul Vixie