Reading about the recent PSN incident I thought I would throw my two cents in, being that I have a degree in Network Security.
I and many other network security analysts like what hackers do. Why? Because they force companies to adopt the latest security trends and fix holes faster. This is a good thing because it prevents larger issues from happening later. Imagine if Sony left their security the way it was for another 10 years.... The PSN network would have probably been deleted altogether, and all of your data would be taken.
Be glad that Sony had such nice hackers come by that didn't actually use that credit card information and other stolen items. Now the information is gonna get the proper protection it needs. On top of that governments like Japan's have taken notice of how horrible companies like Sony handle these situations.
Let me give you an example of something that happened long ago by a white hat. He made the worlds first and most destructive worm ever.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Tappan_Morris
His worm infected something like 1/10th of the worlds computers and shut down the INTERNET for something like a week. My teacher Aman Abdulla taught me about him and said that us network people wanted to let him go. He identified a MAJOR security problem.
