cracker

n. One who breaks security on a system. Coined ca. 1985 by hackers in
defense against journalistic misuse of hacker (q.v., sense 8). An earlier
attempt to establish worm in this sense around 1981--82 on Usenet was
largely a failure. Use of both these neologisms reflects a strong revulsion
against the theft and vandalism perpetrated by cracking rings. The neologism
cracker in this sense may have been influenced not so much by the term
safe-cracker as by the non-jargon term cracker , which in Middle English
meant an obnoxious person (e.g., What cracker is this same that deafs our
ears / With this abundance of superfluous breath? Shakespeare's King John,
Act II, Scene I) and in modern colloquial American English survives as a
barely gentler synonym for white trash. While it is expected that any real
hacker will have done some playful cracking and knows many of the basic
techniques, anyone past larval stage is expected to have outgrown the desire
to do so except for immediate, benign, practical reasons (for example, if
it's necessary to get around some security in order to get some work done).
Thus, there is far less overlap between hackerdom and crackerdom than the
mundane reader misled by sensationalistic journalism might expect. Crackers
tend to gather in small, tight-knit, very secretive groups that have little
overlap with the huge, open poly-culture this lexicon describes; though
crackers often like to describe themselves as hackers, most true hackers
consider them a separate and lower form of life. An easy way for outsiders
to spot the difference is that crackers use grandiose screen names that
conceal their identities. Hackers never do this; they only rarely use noms
de guerre at all, and when they do it is for display rather than
concealment. Ethical considerations aside, hackers figure that anyone who
can't imagine a more interesting way to play with their computers than
breaking into someone else's has to be pretty losing. Some other reasons
crackers are looked down on are discussed in the entries on cracking and
phreaking. See also samurai , dark-side hacker , and hacker ethic. For a
portrait of the typical teenage cracker, see warez d00dz.

