A ``computer hacker,'' then, is
someone who lives and breathes computers, who knows all about computers, who
can get a computer to do anything. Equally important, though, is the hacker's
attitude. Computer programming must be a hobby, something done for fun, not out
of a sense of duty or for the money.
There are hackers who work for
large companies whose purpose is to protect the companies for whom they work.
There are hackers who hack for the pure pleasure of hacking. There are hack
activists who hack to protest corporate or political policy. There are hackers
who get paid to hack accounts, passwords, CAPTCHA and other lucrative targets.
And, there are those hackers who just want to exploit, embarrass and expose.
They’re all hackers.
The word hacker still carries
negative connotations because good hackers are never profiled in movies, TV,
book and other media forms. To deflect some of this negative perception,
hackers attempted to create a related term: cracker. Hackers coined cracker as
a reaction to journalists who misrepresented all hackers as criminals. You
hardly hear the term cracker anymore related to computer system compromises. It
never really caught on as an alternative term for those with unsavory
intentions.
Hacker
now refers to anyone, regardless of intention or perspective, who attempts to
compromise computer systems.
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