How does that stuff work, exactly? I mean how does someone (or is it even possible?) "penetrate" into another person’s computer and then get their credit card (how does credit card theft even work?) or somehow "download" their files onto the hacker's computer? Does it matter if the target's computer is on or off or on and being used? If on and being used how does the target don't notice? How would one "download" a terabyte of someone's files and do it quickly (within a day) and unnoticed? Doing it from another continent? How would it differ from OS to OS? How would they gain root on a unix computer? How would they do it and how would it differ on a linux one? How would (and what are) 0days and how would they play into this? How are exploits created and used? How do you protect and secure yourself from such things? What if you became a target?
>>4 They attack the underlying platform that's most likely written in an unsafe language. Answering the rest of your questions, ``cracking'' is usually scamming, using well-known vulnerabilities in popular software or a bit of both.
>>6 The term you are using is wrong, blackhat is just a black hat. I have a black hat and I love it, this post makes me very upset. the term you want to use is cracking. If you really don't want to say cracking then say redhat because I hate red hats and because redhat sucks