At first, I really believe critical hacks or counter hacks are based on scans or cloaks. Until this occur...

Successfully hacked a ship but ate a trap (Quantum Firewall Trap), surrounding my ship with its effects! I now got 250 scans & 0 cloak abilities. An experienced hacker (equal rank) hacked me.... result: failed to hack into your ship computer. You counter-hack and steal 0 Research Points!

So counter-hack or critical hacks are based on random luck? Be free to share some of your hacking experiences to prove if I m correct or not. Thanks!

there's an absolute minimum chance of failure...

it's kinda like in Dungeons & Dragons, where if your D20 (20-sided die) rolls a 1, it's an automatic failure (and depending on the DM, there's a chance of critical failure) even if your ability is great enough to "always succeed"... on the other hand, rolling a 20 is an automatic success with chance of critical

as for the counterhack, it's based on how poorly they failed... not how good your ability is

Thanks Lone! Ok... so it's the same calculation or chances, just like planet invasion.

Although your cloak was zero, you still had some Scan - which would have counted towards the counter-hack check also.

1) If your cloak is higher then targets scan you are able to attempt a hack.
2) Your Scan+Cloak vs. Targets Scan+Cloak = Hack result check.

I suspect that if they crit fail their hack to give you a counter-hack then (1) is not checked, it just moves to (2) for the result check.