The Hacker Underground is dead. Long live the Hacker Underground! In the most recent issue of Phrack Magazine, I read an article titled “The Underground Myth,” that makes a number of astute points about the demise of the hacking scene of the last few decades. The author describes a technical landscape in which the technology security industry and a diminishing number of obvious exploits conspired to destroy the scene as it existed throughout the 1980s and ’90s.