When were media publications about hacker culture so popular anyways? It's true that there has been a boom is online social interaction even among the more "secluded geeky" types in the recent years, but it's also true that "black hat" hackers are now more sophisticated than ever: never before have we heard of things like automated patch-diffing exploits.
This "evolution" doesn't just apply to criminals. in the scholar community, there are plenty of security researchers writing all sorts of papers on the most obscure aspects of computing, and even outside that, there are still those hobbyists who passionately like to explore the limits of our systems, even if only on their spare time. The magnitude and scope of our systems may have become more accomodating to the mainstream culture, but the hacker culture continues to live just as strong, as you put it, "typing silently the night away".
This "evolution" doesn't just apply to criminals. in the scholar community, there are plenty of security researchers writing all sorts of papers on the most obscure aspects of computing, and even outside that, there are still those hobbyists who passionately like to explore the limits of our systems, even if only on their spare time. The magnitude and scope of our systems may have become more accomodating to the mainstream culture, but the hacker culture continues to live just as strong, as you put it, "typing silently the night away".