Comment Articles

Turning script kiddies into programmers

Robert Vamosi AnchorDesk

Published: 22 Jan 2002 13:56 GMT

Last month I got an email from a 19-year-old San Francisco Bay Area youth who objected to my frequent use of the term "script kiddie." He felt I was picking on young people as a group, and therefore guilty of ageism. He noted that older people are interested in writing destructive viruses, too. He's right about that. The email got me thinking: Where does the admittedly pejorative term "script kiddie" come from, anyway? And how do we encourage young people to get interested in Internet security as a tool for good?

In terms of nicknames, script kiddie is the lowest on the totem pole. "Hacker," either white hat (good) or black hat (bad), is the most commonly used term for people who find software vulnerabilities. The term "cracker" applies to those who break into software or Web servers, often with criminal intentions.

Then comes script kiddie, a term that refers to anyone who is not technologically sophisticated enough to understand the Internet vulnerability they are attempting to exploit, who often uses tools created by others.

The term hacker goes back to the early days of computing and has itself changed in meaning from good to bad. Cracker, according to word specialists Logophilia.com, first appeared in the mainstream media in a 1996 Seattle Times article. Although it has been used informally in newsgroups since the mid-1990s, the term script kiddie had its earliest mainstream appearance in the 7 August, 1997, edition of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, according to Logophilia.com. You'll notice none of these definitions refer to age. A cracker could be 13 or 53. Technically, so could a script kiddie.

Still, some recent incidents support the script kiddie stereotype. The individuals who unleashed the Goner worm on the Internet in early December were teenagers who used a worm (or parts of a worm) built by someone else for their own purposes, ignorant of how it would affect others. They claimed in IRC chats that they did not realise Goner had reached people around the world. Sounds to me like a classic definition of a script kiddie.