The reason this 'statement of the hacker' is put on the internet is to try and present an image to the public of some rogue individual being behind this. However I feel they overdid the l33t hacker stuff making it a bit preposterous. Then they add in a reference to Srebrenica to make it seem this 'individual' had a valid motive for attacking a Dutch company. From the circumstances of where the certificates appeared it is however clear that the problems in the Netherlands are just collateral damage while the real targets live in Iran and no motive for the Netherlands is necessary.

I do believe that there are not many people necessary for this act of cyber war, and that there are some young individuals involved that started out as just individual hackers for the love of it but the way the rogue certificates have shown up clearly demonstrates to all the involvement of the Iranian government (or some subset thereof). The Iranian governement has powerful motives and means to commit this act. Also the deeply invasive Stuxnet act of war perpetrated against them will make them by and large oblivious to some Dutch people being duped in the course of their actions.

There is a nice echo to this from the Stuxnet affair. After that was found out there were also many bogus claims being circulated on the Internet of other countries like China or Russia to be the real target, no doubt instigated in part by Isreali and American intelligence agencies. And we all know what kind of FUD that turned out to be.

Stuxnet and this CA certificate hacking also demonstrate the internet has entered a new age of being really entwined in politics, commerce and war in all its facets.

It's not really likely that this person did the 'hacking' on his own. The certificates somehow found their way into the Iranian backbone networks and I do no believe that they got there by the actions of one person, nor do I believe that they could get there without the backing of the Iranian government (or some cabal within it). The message on pastebin is clearly formatted to make some people believe in a ' lonely superhacker', but I am not buying that line. For one the first sentence ends on 'us'.

http://www.alice.org/ I heard about this almost a year ago in a talk by Randy Pausch from Carnegie Mellon University, but haven't had time to check it out. It is supposed to make the learning experience of programming better. Also maybe if you have some first programs written a bit of competition could do no harm: http://www.topcoder.com/ The series of Head First books from O'Reilly also made a favourable impression on me.