There are still hacking cases in Australia. About the same time as Mendax's case was being heard in Victoria, The Crawler pleaded guilty to 23 indictable offences and thirteen summary offences--all hacking related charges--in Brisbane District Court. On 20 December 1996, the 21-year-old Queenslander was given a three-year suspended prison sentence, ordered to pay $5000 in reparations to various organisations, and made to forfeit his modem and two computers. The first few waves of hackers may have come and gone, but hacking is far from dead. It is merely less visible. Law enforcement agencies and the judiciaries of several countries have tried to send a message to the next generation of would-be hackers. The message is this: Don't hack. But the next generation of elite hackers and phreakers have heard a very different message, a message which says: Don't get caught. The principle of deterrence has not worked with hackers at this level. I'm not talking here about the codes-kids--the teeny-bopper, carding, wanna-be nappies who hang out on IRC (Internet relay chat). I'm talking about the elite hackers. If anything, law enforcement crackdowns have not only pushed them further underground, they have encouraged hackers to become more sophisticated than ever before in the way they protect themselves. Adversity is the mother of invention. When police officers march through the front door of a hacker's home today, they may be better prepared than their predecessors, but they will also be facing bigger hurdles. Today, top hackers encrypt everything sensitive. The data on their hard drives, their live data connections, even their voice conversations. So, if hackers are still hacking, who are their targets? It is a broad field. Any type of network provider--X.25, cellular phone or large Internet provider. Computer vendors--the manufacturers of software and hardware, routers, gateways, firewalls or phone switches. Military institutions, governments and banks seem to be a little less fashionable these days, though there are still plenty of attacks on these sorts of sites. Attacks on security experts are still common, but a new trend is the increase in attacks on other hackers' systems. One Australian hacker joked, `What are the other hackers going to do? Call the Feds? Tell the AFP, "Yes, officer, that's right, some computer criminal broke into my machine and stole 20000 passwords and all my exploitation code for bypassing firewalls".' For the most part, elite hackers seem to work alone, because of the well-advertised risks of getting caught. There are still some underground hacking communities frequented by top hackers, most notably UPT in Canada and a few groups like the l0pht in the US, but such groups are far less common, and more fragmented than they used to be.