Hacker conventions, such as those being held in Las Vegas this week, are no longer considered the sinister gatherings they once were. If the slot machines get a little screwy this week, casino detectives will have plenty of suspects. Thousands of computer hackers and security experts begin converging in Las Vegas Tuesday for the annual Black Hat Briefings and Def Con convention on computer security.. . .
Hacker conventions, such as those being held in Las Vegas this week, are no longer considered the sinister gatherings they once were. If the slot machines get a little screwy this week, casino detectives will have plenty of suspects. Thousands of computer hackers and security experts begin converging in Las Vegas Tuesday for the annual Black Hat Briefings and Def Con convention on computer security.

With individuals and corporations increasingly relying on buggy software and the Internet to manage everything from their finances to their personal health records, incidents of malicious hacking continue to increase.

More than 7,000 computer security violations were reported in the first three months of this year, more than in all of 1998, according to the CERT Coordination Center, a security research group at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh.