So recently EA had a massive data leak including 700 GBs worth of FIFA, which I'm sure they'll be able to gain a hefty sum of 30 pennies for.

But I'd be hard pressed to call it hacking, as it turns out no software barriers were felled. Instead, the problem was with Layer 8: There were no efforts made to verify the identity of the data requester.

Many of us have worked in Information Technology. Have you ever had something similar occur?

This is hacking. The fat bespectacled nerd is a power fantasy invented by bespectacled fatties too stupid to be nerds. Most hacking is social engineering.

This is why privacy agreements aren't worth the fog they are written on. Same for EULA's (They always include a 'We reserve the right to change this agreement without notice'.)

It's a joke. The only people it helps are the vendor's legal team.

I beg to differ. Surely you can recall the worm wars and corporate espionage tactics that involved more covert tactics than "Trick the idiot/find the obvious loophole"?

*Most* hacking is social engineering. You said the EA leak wasn't hacking, I said it was most representative of IRL hacking. It would only be more iconic if EA just left the files on a public-facing server.

I know a friend of a friend who hacked a place. He walked up to the turnstiles at the office's entrance on a weekend, held up a passcard to the reader, and when it didn't work, sighed and said loud enough for security to hear, "Well I guess that's it then". And security let him in.

In any organization ar bid as EA screw ups are going to happen. No fan of EA, but a lot of the comments here display a ignorance of how computer programming works. "Fat bespetacled nerds"make mistakes like anybody else.