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}.
[glossary]
[Reference(s) to this entry by made by: {back door}{black hat}{buffer overflow}{bug-of-the-month club}{courier}{crack}{cracking}{dark-side hacker}{firewall machine}{hacker}{handle}{honey pot}{iron box}{munching}{samurai}{script kiddies}{social engineering}{tiger team}{virus}{warez}{warez d00dz}{worm}]