I feel that this article on hacking in RPGs is relevant to this thread:
https://knightattheopera.blogspot.co...g-in-rpgs.html
Quoting a few key paragraphs:
...the easiest way to integrate hacking would just be to tell the players "make a hacking roll" whenever they want to cheese a device, but then there'll be a player at your table who wants to be the hacker, and they need something more in-depth in order to fulfill their fantasy.
Yes, the vast majority of what hacking actually entails is just normal deception and thievery skills. Maybe it's pretending to be a hustler on Fifth Avenue handing out your mixtape to random pedestrians, banking on at least one of them to plug it into their device at home and upload your malware themselves. Maybe it's seducing someone in a bar for a one-night stand so that you can wait until they're asleep and then steal their work ID and make a clone of it. Maybe it's running up to someone at the bus stop and desperately pleading to borrow their phone so you can make an emergency call because you're in a jam, and then using that opportunity to steal their bank login info. Sometimes it's literally just sending somebody a dangerous URL that looks innocuous and tricking them into clicking it.
...hacking is just one part of cybersecurity, and when you study cybersecurity, you're definitely focused on the computer parts. But an IT guy making sure their company has a firewall on their network isn't the kind of thing your player is talking about when they say they want to play as a hacker. For that, you want what I'm selling: basically just a rogue but with some digital "spellcasting" powers. This is what Mr. Robot understood about the subject and what you'll benefit from as well: you need to focus on how you are using your hacking powers and what you're using them for, rather than on how the hacking itself works.
Now, hacking is different from thievery in that most thief players would probably be perfectly happy just rolling a die at a penalty in order to accomplish thiefy tasks. Thieves don't have the same need hacker-oriented players think they do to have a mechanically-complicated system to interact with. But the things hackers want to accomplish are of interest, such as turning the bad guy's minions against him or taking control of traffic lights, may inspire thoughts about what RPG thieves
could potentially do, like rewiring traps to disable the "disable" lever or blackmailing minions.
And the insight that hacking is 90% social engineering hints that maybe a key to making thievery fun in RPGs is to build in social systems complex enough that social engineering is possible. Maybe thieves work better in dungeons with multiple factions; where hobgoblin guards sometimes go off duty and retire to the barracks or go for a meal in a different area of the dungeon; where permissions are differentiated and only members of the High Priesthood are permitted into secure areas of the Blue Temple, which is protected by tougher traps and locks and meteoric iron (per Kromm's posts above).
Hope you get as much insight out of the article as I did.