The person who this week brought you the love bug and billions of dollars in damage this week is most likely a white male teen or twentysomething, somewhat socially inept, reasonably intelligent and bored.
That's according to the profile offered by various security specialists which try to define the minds of people who like to break into other computers with malicious intent - phreakers, crackers, newbies, coders, script kiddies and hacktivists.
Hacker is a term that most computer aficionados prefer not to use, since it was originally an admiring term used to describe people who were particularly talented at writing computer code and adding bits on to or changing existing programs, not people who try to destroy other individual computers or computer networks.
Many security specialists believe the "I love you" virus (or more properly, "worm"), like its predecessor the Melissa virus, is the work of so-called script kiddies, the vandals of the computing world who fall at the low end of the hacker/cracker continuum.
The program itself is not very sophisticated and the kind of damage it causes is a hallmark of the script kiddie brand of show-off destructive intent. Such "cyber punks" tend to want to prove themselves and their capabilities with computers, to use damaging programs and cause as much havoc as possible.
Ironically, though, they earn the contempt of hackers and of the more capable crackers, because their programs are usually so basic.
They also tend not to be original - script kiddies are so-called because they use existing "scripts" or program code for viruses. The scripts are in many cases freely available on the Internet, if you know where to look.
In some cases, the scripts are posted not to give young crackers the chance to try them out but because they are used as a resource by security specialists and system operators - they're a kind of library of viruses that keep people informed about what they need to be able to protect against.
Indeed, many say the reason they post such code, or actually crack computer systems to deface websites or shut them down by overloading them with hits (the "denial of service" style attacks which plagued many top sites earlier this year) is to keep companies that have websites or engage in ecommerce on their toes.
They insist they are providing a public service by pointing out the weaknesses of websites and computer systems to a world that doesn't seem to understand the complexity of networks and the obligation to provide adequate security to clients, customers and other users of their Internet sites.
But the hackers and crackers, who are more technically-literate, tend to condemn such attacks for the problems they cause for everyday Internet users and the mindless damage caused to companies.
Many self-described hackers affiliated with some of the recognised hacker groups were scornful of the 15-year-old boy recently charged with the denial of service attacks from earlier this year.
For most people, though, the "I love you" worm is a shocking reminder of how vulnerable we all are when linked into a large, complex and communal organism like the Internet.
As in the real world, those who are punished tend to be the unwary, the unprepared and the nonchalant. But as more and more people link into the Net, those words will describe ever larger slices of the online population.
