Hackers

Several definitions..,

1. A person who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and how to stretch their capabilities.

2. Someone who likes to tinker with electronics or computer systems.

3. [deprecated] A malicious meddler who tries to discover sensitive information by poking around. The correct term for this sense is "cracker."

Any way hackers like to explore and learn how computer systems work, finding ways to make them do what they do better, or do things they weren’t intended to do. There are two major types of hackers. Black Hats and White Hats.

Black Hats: These are considered as the villains or the bad guys. Black hat hackers usually use their skills maliciously for personal gain. They are the people that hack banks, steal credit cards, and deface websites.

White Hats: These are considered the good guys. White hat hackers don’t use their skills for illegal purposes. They perform hacking for legitimate reasons. They usually become Computer Security experts and help protect people from the Black Hats.
e.g. IT Security technicians testing their systems and researchers testing the limits of systems.

(These two terms came from the old western movies where the good guys wore white hats and the bad guys wore black hats.)

And also there is a hierarchy,

 Script kiddies:
These are the wannabe hackers. They are looked down upon in the hacker community because they are the people that make hackers look bad. Script kiddies usually have no hacking skills and use the tools developed by other hackers without any knowledge of what’s happening behind the scenes.

Intermediate hackers:
These people usually know about computers, networks, and have enough programming knowledge to understand relatively what a script might do, but like the script kiddies they use pre-developed well-known exploits (- a piece of code that takes advantage of a bug or vulnerability in a piece of software that allows you to take control of a computer system) to carry out attacks

Elite Hackers:
These are the skilled hackers. They are the ones that write the many hacker tools and exploits out there. They can break into systems and hide their tracks or make it look like someone else did it. You should strive to eventually reach this level.

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