APPEARANCE: The image that occurred to me the other day was a map similar to the visual style of Pandemic. A blackish board with a vector style outline of the world's nations, etc...
GENERAL CONCEPT: You play as some entity that has to hack various systems. You are not necessarily the hacker, but someone who hires hackers for the benefit of some organization (say: Russian Mafia, US National Security or some such thing). Each country/region on the map has a set of computers that can be hacked, indicated by a little circle with a computer icon inside. Around the circle are smaller icons indicating attributes of that computer. It's "IP" address (explained below), it's Operating System, What type of computer (home use, industrial, commercial/banking, national security), and how difficult it is to hack. This computers have lines that reach out to their neighbor computers.
The computer's IP Address is based upon it's location. The world will be divided into various regions and subregions, and each region has a block of addresses and the subregions are another block, etc...
So you can pretend the US is: Region 0, and East half is subregion 3, and North East is subregion 0, and a computer in NYC would be computer 4. so it's IP is 0.3.0.4... A west coast computer might be: 0.0.1.2...
Players would collect cards with various values of say... 1-4 or maybe 1-8 or whatever (will have to figure this out). Then they can play those cards in order to match the specific computer they want to attack.
In order to attack, they need to hire the right type of hacker. If they want to DDOS a website, they could just hire a script kiddy. If they want to penetrate a network, maybe a rogue defense agent. If they wanted to put a drive by virus on a computer, they might hire Russian Mafia or something.
Each one of these, of course, carries a cost.
One faction of "Script Kiddies" could be CURIOUS. They wear masks of a certain little monkey. They do not forgive, they do not forget... BANANA!
I don't have much else right now - no mechanics (I don't want to rely on the catastrophe dice too much - but I could see that being something to utilize in the sense of a system of increasing difficulties - but hell, I could just use a rating and add modifiers for each type of hacker and just roll 2d10 for a percent to hit. Pretty simple, and maybe I will, actually.
I'm also pondering making it easier to hack computers that are closer than farther away. Not necessarily realistic but it could add some minor strategy (my long term goal is to hack X, so I want to get an easier computer Y near it so it's easier to hack it).