Oldfag here, no one seems to remember that the "Cult of the Dead cow" was a bunch of larpers, or as we called them then, posers, and were roundly mocked by real hackers. They were mocked for being pretentious namefags, and stealing other peoples work and calling it their own. Think about this anons, all you needed to hack stuff in the early 80's was a modem, a vic 20 with a terminal emulator, and the phone number of the target. Nothing was locked down, no company or even Mil expected attacks by modem. Wild fucking west it was. Amazing shit was done, amazing shit was seen, and 99% of real hackers never talked about it, much less gave fucking magazine interviews.

Best guess is that Cult of the dumb sow and others like it were three letter agency honypots, so real hackers stayed the fuck away from it. Seeing where the "founders" ended up, that guess was right on the money.