Back in my day, I would probe by hand. Now you can get commercial software that does the job for you.

For the average home-user, anti-virus software is a must.

Back up everything! You are not invulnerable. Catastrophic data loss can happen to you - one worm or Trojan is all it takes.

I get hired to hack into computers now and sometimes it's actually easier than it was years ago.

I'm still a hacker. I get paid for it now. I never received any monetary gain from the hacking I did before. The main difference in what I do now compared to what I did then is that I now do it with authorization.

So what I was essentially doing was, I compromised the confidentiality of their proprietary software to advance my agenda of becoming the best at breaking through the lock.