Hacker

A hacker is someone who studies a computer system until understanding it better than its designers, to improve it, bend it to new uses and share what they have learned.

The word was born in the late 1950s at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), in the model railroad club whose members called a clever solution a "hack", and then moved into the first computing labs.

The hacker logic has three traits that Steven Levy described in 1984 as the hacker ethic: access to computers and knowledge should be free, information should circulate, and people are judged by what they can do. Free software, open source (public source code that anyone can read and modify) and systems such as Linux all descend from it.

An ethical hacker applies the same skill to security: with the owner's written authorisation, they attack a system to find its weaknesses and hand them to whoever must fix them. The penetration test (a controlled simulation of an attack) is their working tool. The press often uses "hacker" for people who break into other people's systems to steal or destroy: for those who know the history of the term, that figure is a cracker, and the difference lies entirely in permission and purpose.

Source: Steven Levy, «Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution», 1984; The Jargon File, voce «hacker».

Enrico Giubertoni. Licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0: you may quote, translate and adapt this entry with the author’s name and a link, stating any changes. For commercial use, write to info@enricogiubertoni.com

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