Most likely the "hacker" broke into the FTP server because the admin of that server used the word "password" as his password. So natural selection took them both out. Two less idiots to deal with.
That's an interesting attitude. Do you often find yourself having to "deal with" benign-but-ignorant FTP admins? Keep in mind that many people running FTP sites are not technical by trade, and you're using a rather wide brush stroke to paint a bad picture of many perfectly reasonable people.
Besides, judging by the recent submission of the decompiled code from RTM's worm from 1988 (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1916186), hackers are a bit more sophisticated than you imply.
One does not have to be "technical by trade" to know that using "password" as your password is wrong. Only idiots do that. And they do do that, otherwise the "sophisticated hackers" (I jest) would not be "cracking" all of these OpenSSH servers by guessing the passwords. The user sets passwords such as secret, letmein, abc123, etc. And then these "elite hackers" you speak of come along doing simple brute force because... wait for it... it works: http://www.dragonresearchgroup.org/insight/sshpwauth-cloud.h...
> using "password" as your password is wrong. Only idiots do that
and that means they deserve their files being deleted? What if that person was a non-tech savvy biologist working on cancer research? Or a college admin person and those files were the grades for the graduating year?
Serves 'em right for choosing a lame password and not setting up their own RAID server, eh?
I don't know jot all about car repair and if I tried to enact a casual repair and burnt myself or caused some other catastrophe, it would not be unreasonable to be considered an "idiot" by a professional mechanic.
The merit of the agent or situation involved (picking a cancer researcher seems like a clever and emotional rhetorical ploy) does not affect the demand for having domain knowledge when using or maintaining certain systems.
