Common Hacking Terms

Computer hacking is becoming increasingly common these days. While black hat hackers may be involved in malicious activities like identity theft or the creation of Trojan Horses, some hackers just hack for heck of it.
You have to be smart to protect yourself from hackers. Make sure your computer is properly protected. There are many programs that will do this for you, but you can do it yourself as well if you learn how. Do not download anything unless you absolutely trust the source and configure your computer so that its security settings are tight. Install a firewall to protect it as well. Another thing you can do is to learn the common terms that hackers use. Knowing these terms will help you understand how hacking works and how to protect yourself from it.
• Back door – a hole deliberately placed by designers into a security system. Hackers use back doors to get into a system.
• Bit bucket – the universal data dump. Lost, deleted, or destroyed data ends up here.
• Black hat – a criminal hacker who causes damage and breaks the law by hacking.
• Cracker – someone who breaks into a security system. Many hackers separate themselves from crackers because crackers are often tied to organized crime rings.
• Daisy-chaining – process where a hacker gains entry into a computer or network and then uses it to gain access to another.
• Deep magic – a special technique central to a program.
• Hacker – a person who is able to break into a computer’s system without permission.
• Hacking run – a hacking session that lasts in an excess of eight to ten hours.
• Foo – term used as a sample name for programs and files.
• Gray hat – a hacker who sometimes hacks illegally and sometimes hacks “legally”.
• KISS Principle – acronym for “Keep It Simple Stupid,” used to control development complexity by hackers.
• Kluge – a clever programming trick that works for the wrong reason.
• Lots of MIPS but no I/O – describes a system that has a lot of processing power, but a bottlenecked input/output.
• Munge – a rewrite of a routine, data structure, or whole program.
• Netiquette – the standards of politeness across the internet; not often observed by hackers.
• Phreaking – the science of cracking a phone network.
• Script kiddie – a “copycat hacker” who copies other hacker’s techniques without creating anything of their own.
• Security through obscurity – hacker term for a common way of dealing with security holes where they are ignored and not documented with the hope nobody finds them.
• Sneaker – an individual hired to break into places with the purpose of testing their security.
• Spaghetti code – code that has a complex and tangled control structure.
• Time bomb – program that is set to trigger once certain conditions are reached.
• Trojan horse – program that disguises itself as one thing but once inside a computer, it actually does something else. Most often, they are damaging (viruses), but not all are.
• White hat – a hacker who is considered “nice” i.e. when he hacks, he informs the owner he has done it.
• Vaporware – term used by hackers referring to products released in advance of their official release date.
• Wetware – phrase referring to humans on the other end of a computer system.
• Virus – a self-replicating program that inserts itself into computer systems and causes damage.
• Voodoo programming – the use by guess of an obscure system that someone doesn’t really understand; i.e., whether it works or doesn’t work, the user has no real idea why.
• Vulcan nerve pinch – a keyboard combination that forces a soft-boot.
• Wedged – a point where a system is stuck; different from a crash, where the system is nonfunctioning.
• Wizard – person who completely understands how a program or process works.