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In a positive connotation, though, hacking can also be utilized by legitimate figures in legal situations. For example, law enforcement agencies sometimes use hacking techniques to collect evidence on criminals and other malicious actors.
This could include using anonymity tools (such as a VPN or the dark web) to mask their identities online and pose as criminals. Likewise, covert world agencies can employ hacking techniques in the legal conduct of their work. Hacking and cyber-attacks are used extra-legally and illegally by law enforcement and security agencies (conducting warrantless espionage [or even sabotage] activities) and employed by state actors as weapons of legal and illegal warfare.
Hacking can also have a broader sense of any roundabout solution to problems, or programming and hardware development in general, and hacker culture has spread the term's broader usage to the general public, even outside the profession or hobby of electronics.
Reflecting the two types of hackers, there are two definitions of the word "hacker".
Mainstream usage of "hacker" mostly refers to computer criminals, due to the mass media usage of the word since the 1990s. This includes what hacker jargon calls script kiddies, less skilled criminals who rely on tools written by others with very little knowledge about the way they work.
This usage has become so predominant that the general public is largely unaware that different meanings exist. Though the self-designation of hobbyists as hackers is generally acknowledged and accepted by computer security hackers, people from the programming subculture consider computer intrusion-related usage incorrect and emphasize the difference between the two by calling security breakers "crackers" (analogous to a safecracker).
The controversy is usually based on the assertion that the term originally meant someone messing about with something in a positive sense, that is, using playful cleverness to achieve a goal. But then, it is supposed, the meaning of the term shifted over the decades and came to refer to computer criminals.
As security-related usage has spread more widely, the original meaning has become less known. In popular usage and media, "computer intruders" or "computer criminals" is the exclusive meaning of the word. In computer enthusiast and hacker culture, the primary meaning is the complimentary description for a particularly brilliant programmer or technical expert. A large segment of the technical community insists the latter is the correct usage, as in the Jargon File definition.
Sometimes, "hacker" is simply used synonymously with "geek". "A true hacker is not a group person. He's a person who loves to stay up all night, he and the machine are in a love-hate relationship. They are kids who tend to be brilliant but not very interested in conventional goals. It is a term of derision and also the ultimate compliment".
Fred Shapiro thinks that "the common theory that 'hacker' originally was a benign term and the malicious connotations of the word were a later perversion is untrue". He found that the malicious connotations were already present at MIT in 1963 (quoting The Tech, an MIT student newspaper), and at that time referred to unauthorized users of the telephone network, that is, the phreaker movement that developed into the computer security hacker subculture of today.
Civic hackers use their security and/or programming acumen to create solutions, often public and open-source, addressing challenges relevant to neighborhoods, cities, states, or countries and the infrastructure within them. Municipalities and major government agencies such as NASA have been known to host hackathons or promote a specific date as a "National Day of Civic Hacking" to encourage participation from civic hackers.
Civic hackers though often operating autonomously and independently, may work alongside or in coordination with certain aspects of government or local infrastructure such as trains and buses. For example, in 2008, Philadelphia-based civic hacker William Entriken developed a web application that displayed a comparison of the actual arrival times of local SEPTA trains to their scheduled times after being reportedly frustrated by the discrepancy.
Security hackers are people involved with the circumvention of computer security. There are several types, including;
White Hat Hacker
Hackers work to keep data safe from other hackers by finding system vulnerabilities that can be mitigated. White hats are usually employed by the target system's owner and are typically paid (sometimes quite well) for their work. Their work is not illegal because it is done with the system owner's consent.
Black Hat Hacker or Cracker
Hackers with malicious intentions. They often steal, exploit, and sell data, and are usually motivated by personal gain. Their work is usually illegal. A cracker is like a black hat hacker but is specifically someone who is very skilled and tries via hacking to make profits or to benefit, not just to vandalize. Crackers find exploits for system vulnerabilities and often use them to their advantage by either selling the fix to the system owner or selling the exploit to other black hat hackers, who in turn use it to steal information or gain royalties.
Grey Hat Hacker
Computer security experts may sometimes violate laws or typical ethical standards but do not have the malicious intent typical of a black hat hacker.
Hacker culture is an idea derived from a community of enthusiast computer programmers and systems designers in the 1960s around the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT's) Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC) and the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. The concept expanded to the hobbyist home computing community, focusing on hardware in the late 1970s (e.g., the Homebrew Computer Club) and on software (video games, software cracking, the demoscene) in the 1980s/1990s. Later, this would go on to encompass many new definitions such as art, and life hacking.
Four primary motives have been proposed as possibilities for why hackers attempt to break into computers and networks.
The main basic difference between the programmer subculture and computer security hacker is their mostly separate historical origin and development. However, the Jargon File reports that considerable overlap existed for the early phreaking at the beginning of the 1970s.
An article from MIT's student paper The Tech used the term hacker in this context already in 1963 in its pejorative meaning for someone messing with the phone system. The overlap quickly started to break when people joined in the activity who did it less responsibly. This was the case after the publication of an article exposing the activities of Draper and Engressia.
According to Raymond, hackers from the programmer subculture usually work openly and use their real names, while computer security hackers prefer secretive groups and identity-concealing aliases. Also, their activities in practice are largely distinct. The former focuses on creating new and improving existing infrastructure (especially the software environment they work with), while the latter primarily and strongly emphasizes the general act of circumvention of security measures, with the effective use of the knowledge (which can be to report and help to fix the security bugs or exploitation reasons) being only rather secondary. The most visible difference in these views was in the design of the MIT hackers' Incompatible Timesharing System, which deliberately did not have any security measures.
There are some subtle overlaps, however, since basic knowledge about computer security is also common within the programmer subculture of hackers. For example, Ken Thompson noted during his 1983 Turing Award lecture that it is possible to add code to the UNIX "login" command that would accept either the intended encrypted password or a particular known password, allowing a backdoor into the system with the latter password. He named his invention the "Trojan horse". Furthermore, Thompson argued, that the C compiler itself could be modified to automatically generate the rogue code, to make detecting the modification even harder. Because the compiler is itself a program generated from a compiler, the Trojan horse could also be automatically installed in a new compiler program, without any detectable modification to the source of the new compiler. However, Thompson disassociated himself strictly from the computer security hackers: "I would like to criticize the press in its handling of the 'hackers,' the 414 gang, the Dalton gang, etc. The acts performed by these kids are vandalism at best and probably trespass and theft at worst. ... I have watched kids testifying before Congress. Clearly, they are completely unaware of the seriousness of their acts."
The programmer subculture of hackers sees secondary circumvention of security mechanisms as legitimate if it is done to get practical barriers out of the way for doing actual work in special forms, that can even be an expression of playful cleverness. However, the systematic and primary engagement in such activities is not one of the actual interests of the programmer subculture of hackers and it does not have significance in its actual activities, either. A further difference is that, historically, members of the programmer subculture of hackers were working at academic institutions and used the computing environment there. In contrast, the prototypical computer security hacker had access exclusively to a home computer and a modem. However, since the mid-1990s, with home computers that could run Unix-like operating systems and with inexpensive internet home access being available for the first time, many people from outside of the academic world started to take part in the programmer subculture of hacking.
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