Novil wrote:

The correct term for everybody who tries to break into other computer systems is hacker. And I have no sympathy for any of them, regardless of their intentions.

No, the correct term for that is cracker, regardless of ethics. And I don’t really have any sympathy for them either. (With one exception: those that only do it to their own systems, with the goal of improving the security by finding the bugs and then fixing them. AFAIK, this is a very small minority.)

The term hacker has a history going back to the 1960s at least (in the MIT AI Lab and TMRC), with a completely different meaning that is still in use in the community.

The basic difference is this: hackers build things, crackers break them.

Unfortunately, crackers falsely claim to be hackers loudly enough that most of the media has been fooled and seem to think it’s true; even the Jargon File definition of the term has had to add a section for that meaning (though it’s marked as deprecated, giving the correct term).

The correct term for everybody who tries to break into other computer systems is hacker. And I have no sympathy for any of them, regardless of their intentions.

Unfortunately Randomguy does have somewhat of a point about hacker ethics. However in defence, not as many people know the difference between hackers and crackers, therefore they get all of the abuse. Heck, until I was educated on the subject, by pissing off a hacker, I thought that cracker was just a rude word to call white guys.

as much as this must have sucked, please do a bit of reading next time before ranting about hackers. this attack wasn’t the work of a hacker. depending on what the malicious code did and what the motivation to attack your site was one would correctly refer to the idiot who did this as either cracker or script-kiddie.

you really might want to read http://ccc.de/hackerethics?language=en and http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html#what_is

May be, Rocket. Then again these worms also tend to be randomised and automated. Still, it does show the site was getting enough traffic to become a statistical casualty!

And it showed off the effectiveness of my workplace’s new antivirus (lunch breaks are for comics XD) which repeatedly popped up catching and neutering it on each reload… (noscript doing similar via the browser before it even touched the standard AV subsystem when catching up at another point using my home machine)