Definition: hacker

A person who writes programs in assembly language or in system-level languages, such as C. The term often refers to any programmer, but its true meaning is someone with a strong technical background who is "hacking away" at the bits and bytes.

Hackers Have a Bad Name
During the 1990s, the term "hacker" became synonymous with "cracker," which is a person who performs some form of computer sabotage. The association is understandable. In order to be an effective cracker, you had to be a good hacker, thus the terms got intertwined, and hacker won out as the "bad guy" in the popular press (see hack).

However, sometimes, hackers are not worthy of the original meaning of the term. Today, a lot of malicious acts are performed by people with limited knowledge who gain unauthorized entrance into computers to steal data or perform mischief (see script kiddie). In addition, software tools to break into networks and computers are available for sale on the Dark Web, which enables anyone to cause mischief (see Dark Web).

It's Also Not Hollywood
Movies make it seem that a person can sit down at a computer and hack into some highly secured network in a matter of seconds. That is simply not true. In many cases, software is executed that searches for vulnerabilities. In addition, groups of people often work together to achieve results over time. See cracker, white hat hacker, samurai and Anonymous.

Hackers Targeted the Internet

By the time this article appeared in 2000, hacker was a negative term to most people. This was a huge denial-of-service (DOS) attack on Yahoo!, eBay, Amazon.com and other websites. (Article headline courtesy of the Philadelphia Inquirer.)

Friendly Competition

In 2012, RadioShack challenged "HackerSpace" groups from the East and West coasts to build something "awesome" with RadioShack's Arduino single-board computer. See Arduino.