A friend runs some SIP networks, he said sometimes when hackers get access to a line they make calls to premium numbers in North Korea and other places. They can run up a 5000$ bills pretty quickly.
I have a VPS, when I first got it, it had an additional user setup for some unknown reason. I didn't know it was there until my server was hacked by a bot. I'd suggest adding one step of checking the /home directory or other places to make sure no 'unknown' accounts have been set up.
I'm in my thirties, when I was younger I was certainly more willing to put in the effort to find the music I wanted for free. At the time it seemed much easier to find, for me. Now I pay 10 month for spotify and my effort is much less, but so is my interest.
Here in Ontario, Canada, whenever the teacher go on strike everyone else gets up in arms, the reality is that the teachers are one of the few areas of employment that still have good wages and benefits. Instead of saying we need to bring everyone down to the lowest level we should be asking for everyone to be pulled up to the level of teachers.
Note: Unlike other places, teaching is a great job in Ontario.
Though the logics are similar, the human effort is more in the developing of the tools to sequence DNA, the DNA itself has always existed. With software, the problem might always have existed but a solution needs to be developed independently.
I don't think it's totally random, when my server got taken over I found a list of ip addresses that the script was in turn trying to bruteforce. Someone made that list on purpose, though I don't know why or where the ip's came from.
My VPS had a default username/password called testuser, I never actually noticed it existed till my server got taken over by some chinese bruteforce attack. Every time I rebuilt the server that user account was created, apparently it is part of the image used by my ISP.
My point is that many people probably have their servers taken over in a similar way without even realizing it.
It's funny that we humans think we know things about the ancient past, everything is always a guess with data that we have no concept of how incomplete it is.