What is Hacking??

The idea of hacking may conjure stylized images of electronic vandalism, espionage, dyed hair, and body piercings. Most people associate hacking with breaking the law and assume that everyone who engages in hacking activities is a criminal. Granted, there are people out there who use hacking techniques to break the law, but hacking isn’t really about that. In fact, hacking is more about following the law than breaking it. The essence of hacking is finding unintended or overlooked uses for the laws and properties of a given situation and then applying them in new and inventive ways to solve a problem—whatever it may be.

What is Hacker Ethic?

The original hackers found splendor and elegance in the conventionally dry sciences of math and electronics. They saw programming as a form of artistic expression and the computer as an instrument of that art. Their desire to dissect and understand wasn’ t intended to demystify artistic endeavors; it was simply a way to achieve a greater appreciation of them. These knowledge-driven values would eventually be called the Hacker Ethic: the appreciation of logic as an art form and the promotion of the free flow of information, surmounting conventional boundaries and restrictions for the simple goal of better understanding the world.

Modern hackers like Richard Stallman and Steve Wozniak have continued the hacking legacy, bringing us modern operating systems, programming languages, personal computers, and many other technologies that we use every day.

Who are Hackers & Crackers?

How does one distinguish between the good hackers who bring us the wonders of technological advancement and the evil hackers who steal our credit card numbers? The term cracker was coined to distinguish evil hackers from the good ones. Journalists were told that crackers were supposed to be the bad guys, while hackers were the good guys. Hackers stayed true to the Hacker Ethic, while crackers were only interested in breaking the law and making a quick buck. Crackers were considered to be much less talented than the elite hackers, as they simply made use of hacker-written tools and scripts without understanding how they worked. Cracker was meant to be the catch-all label for anyone doing anything unscrupulous with a computer— pirating software, defacing websites, and worst of all, not understanding what they were doing. But very few people use this term today.

The term script kiddie is sometimes used to refer to crackers, but it just doesn’t have the same zing as the shadowy hacker. There are some who will still argue that there is a distinct line between hackers and crackers, but I believe that anyone who has the hacker spirit is a hacker, despite any laws he or she may break.

Courtesy: Hacking: The Art of Exploitation by Jon Erickson