I was a regular at that IRC channel back then (for a long time - when it was run from a member's home pc, on EFNet, and the new channel names later on), and was at several of the meets that came from it. The channel had 10-20 regular at most, few enough that I knew all of them by handle and their real names (but I haven't seen any of them for almost 15 years). The whole 'security' angle was a joke, yes it was fun to root some boxes when a sploit hit bugtraq or attrition, but I don't remember anyone got much further than some DoS 'advisories' (at that time). Already then there was more money in scaremongering than there was in actual work...
