Hackers don’t want to crash stock exchanges. They want to make money on them.

When the New York Stock Exchange abruptly shut down trading Wednesday morning, there wasn’t much question what most people were worried about. “Let’s hope it’s not a hack,” one money manager told USA Today. “Do they think we’re idiots?” asked a tech blog, scornfully reporting that officials said the problem was just a glitch. Social media filled with angst.

These reactions are understandable: For 20 years, we’ve been talking about a cyber Pearl Harbor, a big event with drama, sound and fury. Instead, we have endless and largely silent espionage and the occasional surreptitious bank robbery. So when something big happens and there is a computer connected anywhere near it, alarms go off. It’s almost wishful thinking.

Why all the fuss? It’s hard not to invoke Chicken Little, apparently one of the patron deities of cybersecurity. The ability of the Internet community to announce that the sky is falling and then generate astounding quantifies of misinformation, abetted by a penchant for conspiracy theory, means that the first reaction to any big system failure is to suspect hacking.

The 2003 Northeast blackout was first blamed on hacking, the 2010 “flash crash” was first blamed on hacking, and Wednesday’s shutdown — as well as an unrelated computer problem that grounded all United Airlines flights — was first blamed on hacking. But that betrays a misunderstanding in popular culture, abetted by the media, about what hackers do and don’t do.

Accept the banality, the routineness of hacking: It’s a job, not an anomaly or Black Swan event. Hacking is predictable, and hackers follow set patterns and routines. Techniques change, but motives remains the same. Evil mad-genius hackers who want to wreak mass havoc on society because they are in a bad mood don’t exist in real life. Hackers, especially those who focus on financial crime, are professionals, and they want money, not crashes. Yes, intelligence agencies hack all the time, but they don’t want front-page attention for it, and their motives in peacetime are not cyber-disruption on a mass scale. Russian oligarchs and Chinese officials stash their wealth on Wall Street — they are not going to crash it and put their piggy banks at risk.

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