Hacking goes public

Hacking in the sense of intrusion into your computer was already possible before 1983 in computer jargon, but until that time there was no public awareness that such activities took place.

This changed with the movie WarGames. This concern was more concrete than when a group of young hackers from Milwaukee, Wisconsin called The 414S invaded computer systems throughout the U.S and Canada, including those of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and the Security Pacific Bank. The case quickly attracted media attention.

The Newsweek article “Beware: Hackers at play” was the first use of the word in the national media, which used the term “hacker” in a degrading manner. Not only among the general public, was the concept such a bad connotation, but also in politics and Justice, where it has since described computer users who have been involved in burglaries in other people’s computers.

These hackers are more traditional and the mentality of phreaking culture was not included for the whole hacker culture during the following years in the mass media coverage. Independently of this development, the term “hacker” was a term for an extremely good programmer.

In an overall sense of the word within the hacker scene it is like a rank: It shows respect and is an award for outstanding skills, which is bestowed by members of the scene.

Since 1988, as part of the Chaos Computer Club (CCC), the female role of the so-called Haecksen was characterized. In 1993, ‘hackers’ was in the first version of the “Internet User’s Glossary” (RFC1392) and is defined as follows:

A person who enjoys to deal with technical details of systems, especially of computer and network systems. Since the mid-1990s the concept of hacktivists as a term has been established for someone who is a politically active hacker.