Hackers are now being recruited by the FBI and Secret Service, or they face the possibility of long prison sentences.

Thanks to this practice, it is belived up to 1 in 4 hackers today might actually be secretly working as FBI informants.

An investigation by the Guardian revealed that federal agencies, in their efforts to crack down on the underground computer hacker world, have started enlisting the help of hackers. At times they go so far as to pose as hackers themselves, making this part of the Internet much less trusting, with paranoid hackers being extra careful.

PC World agrees that up to 25 percent of today's hackers could secretly be informants.

The FBI and Secret Service are successfully forcing hackers to join their forces and turn in their fellow hackers. If they refuse, they could be subject to long prison sentences. With these new partnerships, cyber policing units now have a large force of informants to help them collect information.

Illegal forums that sell stolen identities and credit card information have been started by these informants, which leads to finding out who uses these forums. Informants also manage to become managers in some forums when they say they specialize in stealing identities. Once they gather enough information from these forums, the FBI can then arrest many of its users.

Eric Corley, the publisher of 2600, a quarterly hacker magazine, says that many of these hackers have no choice but to become informants when they are caught.

"Owing to the harsh penalties involved and the relative inexperience with the law that many hackers have, they are rather susceptible to intimidation," Corley told the Guardian.

Of course, this leads to hackers turning in other hackers.

"There are dozens and dozens of hackers who have been shopped by people they thought they trusted," John Young, leader of Cryptome, a website that holds secret documents, said.

One of the most famous stories of a hacker-turned-informant is Adrian Lamo.

Lamo turned in Chelsea Manning for providing secret documents to WikiLeaks. This led to Manning's capture and she has been held in custody for over a year now. It also led to Lamo being labeled as the "world's most hated hacker."