cracker

jargon An individual who attempts to gain unauthorised

access to a computer system. These individuals are often

malicious and have many means at their disposal for breaking

into a system. The term was coined ca. 1985 by hackers in

defence against journalistic misuse of "hacker". An earlier

attempt to establish "worm" in this sense around 1981--82 on

Usenet was largely a failure.

Use of both these neologisms reflects a strong revulsion

against the theft and vandalism perpetrated by cracking rings.

The neologism "cracker" in this sense may have been influenced

not so much by the term "safe-cracker" as by the non-jargon

term "cracker", which in Middle English meant an obnoxious

person (e.g., "What cracker is this same that deafs our ears /

With this abundance of superfluous breath?" -- Shakespeare's

King John, Act II, Scene I) and in modern colloquial American

English survives as a barely gentler synonym for "white

trash".

While it is expected that any real hacker will have done some

playful cracking and knows many of the basic techniques,

anyone past larval stage is expected to have outgrown the

desire to do so except for immediate practical reasons (for

example, if it's necessary to get around some security in

order to get some work done).

Contrary to widespread myth, cracking does not usually involve

some mysterious leap of hackerly brilliance, but rather

persistence and the dogged repetition of a handful of fairly

well-known tricks that exploit common weaknesses in the

security of target systems. Accordingly, most crackers are

only mediocre hackers.

Thus, there is far less overlap between hackerdom and

crackerdom than the mundane reader misled by

sensationalistic journalism might expect. Crackers tend to

gather in small, tight-knit, very secretive groups that have

little overlap with the huge, open hacker poly-culture; though

crackers often like to describe *themselves* as hackers, most

true hackers consider them a separate and lower form of life,

little better than virus writers. Ethical considerations

aside, hackers figure that anyone who can't imagine a more

interesting way to play with their computers than breaking

into someone else's has to be pretty losing.

See also Computer Emergency Response Team, dark-sidehacker, hacker ethic, phreaking, samurai, TrojanHorse.

[Jargon File]

(1998-06-29)