The word hacker evokes images of a dishevelled teenager, lurking behind a computer monitor, breaking into some top security computer system. But a majority of Hollywood films portray hackers as 'good guys', says a researcher.

There is ambiguity about what hackers do and what their motives are. The mix-up is often blamed on the media for creating a negative view of hackers, but are the movies really to blame?

Damian Gordon of the School of Computing at Dublin Institute of Technology (DIT), Ireland, is not so sure. He has homed in on the hacking in live-action, non-documentary movies from the last four decades and come to some interesting conclusions.

Gordon has analysed the characters and plots of a wide range of movies from the 1968 Peter Ustinov classic 'Hot Millions' to 'Die Hard 4.0' by way of 'Weird Science', 'Ferris Bueller's Day Off', 'The Matrix' and 'Jurassic Park'.

In total, Gordon discusses 50 movies in which a character essential to the plot is involved in hacking.

Of the 50 hacker movies on which Gordon focused in his complete list, eight were hacker specific, five were heists, 18 heroic, 15 sci-fi, and 4 true life.

But the most telling statistics come when you look at the morals of the movie hackers. Forty four hackers were good guys and a mere 10 were the bad guys.

Also, 21 hackers were portrayed as 25 years old or younger, 37 hackers were portrayed as 25 to 50, and just two movie hackers were 50 to 75 years old.

Nineteen hacker characters work in the computer industry, 17 were 'full-time' hackers, 12 students, and 12 hackers with other professions.

It is clear from Gordon's analysis that the popular cultural image of a hacker as being a teenager in their bedroom is not being generated from the movies that feature hackers, Gordon explains.

'In fact, the majority of hackers in movies are good guys between 25 and 50 years old who work in either the computer industry or are full-time hackers.'

This matches the hacker's own definition of what a hacker is, rather than the popular stereotype and, concludes Gordon, could help the good-guy hacker community shake off the stereotype, says a DIT release.

These findings were presented in the International Journal of Internet Technology and Secured Transactions.