Hacker Terms

I found a nice explained hacking terminology so I am posting it here. It will help you to understand some expressions more easily

Note – As hacker terminology changes a lot over time some of the terms here may not still be relevant when they are being used. Despite this, most of the terminology will stay and only change slightly if it does; there is more new terminology than there is editing old terminology. I suppose that this helps hackers remain anonymous.

Hacker – A person who modifies something to perform in a way that was different than it was made to do. Not just to do with computer hacking, but in this case it is.

Cracker – Crackers are people who break into a computer system for an offensive purpose, for example defacement. A cracker is still a hacker.

Ethical Hacker – People who hack into systems for defensive purposes, often people hired by companies to pen-test their network.

White hat hacker – Somebody with defensive security intentions, similar to an ethical hacker. White hat hackers existed before ethical hackers.

Black hat hacker – A hacker with malicious or offensive intentions

Gray hat hacker – A combination between white and black hat hackers. We typically say that a gray hat is a white hat by day and a black hat by night. White hats are technically gray hats because black hat hackers can use the tools that white hats use as well. The chances are all white hats have done some black hat hacking at one point because they must have learned to use the tools that they are using ethically to hack a system otherwise they would have no hacking experience.

Script Kiddie – A person who uses tools with no contribution to the hacking community, kiddies don’t know how to create their own tools or use advanced tools and constantly use the same tools to hack a server or system, often not effectively. To some degree all hackers are script kiddies, but a good hacker has the ability to make intelligent decisions such as determining false positives from virus scans.

Hacktivism – Hactivists perform Hacktivism. Hacktivism is a combination between two works: hacker and activist. Somebody who hacks for a cause; maybe they are environmentalists hacking against companies that they think are destroying the environment

Vulnerability – A weakness that could lead to compromised security. It may be discovered accidentally. Somebody may write a script to exploit this vulnerability.

Exploit – A defined method of hacking vulnerability.

0Day – An unreported exploit, typically requires some scripting or coding knowledge, this could be virus, malware or spyware. This can be worth a lot of money if sold to a company. Although extremely risky to sell to companies due to the fact that it is illegal.

War Drivers – People who take some kind of portable device, for example a USB drive or a laptop and just go to a public location. Then they pick up a wireless signal and possibly see what software it is running and maybe find exploits for that software, but war drivers are not limited to this. They often just use this for free internet in the case they don’t have access to it themselves.

Black Box Attacks – Security testing with no knowledge of the network infrastructure, for example attacking a company from the internet.

White Box Attacks – Security testing with complete knowledge of the network infrastructure.

Gray Box Attacks – Internal testing from the perspective of a generic user inside the infrastructure, this user would not be an admin but just a normal user.

Reckless Admins – An admin who is careless, for example using the same password for all of the different things in the network, or an admin who constantly logs on as root instead of generic accounts and then using the “run as...†command to run software as an admin. A reckless admin may not use the latest patches even though they are readily available.