Speaking as a dispenser of justice, I have had to sit through a number of trials of graffitists, and have had to "get into" the group mentality of these people, and it has to be said that the mountain analogy is not so far amiss.
We all know the adage that laws and rules are there to be broken, and there are some people who feel that breaking them is a matter of honour and prestige. Therefore to get your personal grafitti 'tag' on either a high risk or high profile site scores highly among your peers.
I have even had a situation where one grafittist had learnt to do the tag of another, and then started writing it on low prestige sites in order to demonstrate the inferiority of the latter. (Evidence was produced from his bedroom of hours spent perfecting the other guy's tag.)
I imagine that hacking and virus writing are the same mentality writ large. No-one's going to get much cred from breaking into my company website because it's low profile and not particularly well protected. However, getting into the CIA's site and defacing it would gain the perpetrator life-long recognition.
I guess the better you protect your site, the greater the challenge.
My 2p worth.
W