Glossary-of-the-most-common-hacker-expressions

Glossary-of-the-most-common-hacker-expressions

By clone4 | 13371 Reads |

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Lately, when I have been reading the forum, I“ve seen quite a few misconceptions repeated especially by the newer members ;). Anyway consider this article as a brief glossary of the common hacking expressions…

Newbie: generally description of inexperienced person who is new to the hacking ( however isn“t bound just for hacking ). Even though this description assumes low skill of the person, it“s not considered as an insult, but more like description of new member of the community, who“s just began his path.

Noob: description of person who is inexperienced, stupid, or pretending to be something he“s not. It is a insult! Therefore it“s definitely nothing to be proud of, and declaring that you are in noob in your posts isn“t in any way mitigating factor for your stupidity/lack of research, it won“t save you from flame, you just admit your idiocy/ignorance among the community, therefore my advice is obviously don“t use it in that way.

Leet speak ( also 1337,31337 and many more ): originally leet speak was used by true hackers, to stay hidden from search engines and avoid filters on message boards. However as it lost its purpose, it was raped by mainstream and hacker wannabe-s, the common assumption is that whoever uses leet speak is either retard, noob or script kiddy (covered later;) ). But don“t confuse this with regular English slang ( u, wiv, teh, pwned, ur ), which is in small proportion accepted, but when used massively, usually leads to flame. Generally in hacker community plain and proper English is mostly appreciated and used, as majority of it consists of intelligent and educated people.

Hacker : “A “Hacker” in its real sense is not what the media portrays us as. A “Hacker” is someone who thirsts for knowledge and knows how to obtain it. The Medias portrayal of the word is what is commonly known as a “Criminal Hacker / Cracker” which is quoted as a Black Hat by many.”(AldarHawk) I also recommend to read this very useful article: http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html 3 main types of hacker –>

Whitehat hacker : as the name itself gives a clue, it“s hacker who doesn“t do anything malicious, or against the law. Those usually participate on pen-testings, or ,when vulnerability found, contact the admin to fix it. Generally whitehats will try to fix, what blackhat would“ve tried to exploit.

Greyhat hackers : again the name gives the main idea, greyhats are somewhere in the middle, generally not doing anything malicious, but might go and delete something there, deface something here etc., for example because of their believes, as a revenge, because of ethics/morals as so on…

Blackhat hackers : those obviously are hackers, which look for vulnerabilities with clear intention to exploit, damage and destroy. If vulnerability is found, blackhat will usually exploit it just because there is the chance, not because of ethics or any personal/other reasons ( again there are exceptions ). Those also cause, along with skids, the negative view on term hacker in general, as those usually get to the media, and people will are more likely to be informed about defacement of some website, than about somebody who“s fixed very serious security flaw. But don“t confuse blackhat with script kiddy, even though blackhat acts maliciously, and some may not agree with that behaviour, blackhat is still hacker, with a good knowledge and understanding of computers in general, properly making his own way through the exploit. Despite that, some of the whitehats doesn“t agree with idea of blackhats being “hackers” and call them solely crackers. This however depends on your point of view, and it is influenced by number of factors ( morals to name one )

script kiddies (skids etc. there are plenty of names for them ) : those are as i like to call them, hacker wannabe-s. The original name is basically for a person ( usually child-ish :)) who isn“t patient enough to obtain the desired knowledge to be able to exploit and “hack”, and uses tools and scripts of others, to exploit vulnerabilities ( usually but not always with malicious intent ), without the knowledge of the tool or exploit what-so-ever. Now this insult was widened generally to any person who is exploiting, without actually knowing what he“s doing. That includes using different “hack” tools, someone else“s scripts, or just copy/paste exploiting ( especially in web hacking ). Usually also people trying to h4x00r and 0wn their schools networks/websites etc are included :).

Pen-testing ( Penetration testing ) : action where one or more hackers/security experts try to identify security flaws and compromise security of a computer system or a network to prevent any malicious actions to be performed. The results are used as aforementioned to fix the vulnerabilities and improve security of the system

Rooting : part/type of hacking, where hacker is attempting to exploit computer system/network through opened services ( ports ), and rise their access rights within that system, so they can perform intended actions. The name origins in linux systems, where if you get “root” priviledges, you can do basically anything ( including favorite #rm -fr / :D )

Deface : replacing original page/s of a website with hackers own, where hacker somehow gained right to do so ( admin access, backdoor… )

Full disclosure ( IT related ) : this involves providing to the public all information about the vulnerabilities that were found e.g in CMS ( content management system ) including how it was found and/or exploited. It“s been always discussed, as it has several advantages ( admins can fix vulnerabilities before official patch is released etc ) but also few disadvatages ( the information is more used by hackers/crackers to exploit unpatched web site rather then by admins )

And by that I think that the main terms are described, however I“ll appreciate any suggestions to amend current descriptions, or add new ones.

I would also like to state that, as I haven“t used almost any references at all, this article isn“t absolute, and is purely subjective. The descriptions may differ e.g. from wikipedia or urban dictionary, so I“m not forcing anybody to agree with me, however it should give somebody idea, so they can work out their own definitions

Special thanks to COM, who helped I“d say quite radically improve the quality of this article.

Also thanks for great definition of “hacker” and “cracker” by AldarHawk, which is one of the best I“ve ever heard.

Any suggestions for improvement appreciated Thanks for reading clone4