Most of us here probably remember when that was still in theaters. so your not that old.

With me it started a while ago when a guy called 'redAttack' claimed to have hacked one of the biggest companies in Belgium.
It was the first time hacking came into the spotlight in my country, and I was instantly intrigued by how essential and important it sounded, yet how little knowledge everyone seemed to have about it.

Ow, and then I saw Hackers, and I was sold ^^

L-O-L

The movie (WarGames) propelled me.  But it started with the C-64!  ;-)

wargames is from 1983. i was in the planning, but not here yet, hehe.

I work for a large web hosting company and I deal with hacked sites on a daily basis. Unfortunately none of the tech agent from L1 to L3 to our Abuse department really understands or cares how sites are getting hacked. They place ALL of the responsibility on the customer, but give the customer basic info to clean out their site. The info given to the customer is so minute and outdated that the customer's site gets hacked hours after the account is 'cleaned'.  No one was telling the customer about the backdoors that hackers installed.

I created a script that scans for over 300 different signatures found in the shell programs and allows the customer to clean their site out of these often missed programs.

I started getting into hacking because I became curious to know how these hackers are getting in and how to devise or implement ways to stop them or at least help me locate the vulnerability used to gain access. My career has currently stalled after I lost my job as a Windows sys admin because of the economy. I feel that ethical hacking is a newer less flooded market that could take me places. It has renewed my hunger for learning new things as well.