The true meaning of the term "hacker"

When we hear the term "hacker" in the media, it's most often used to designate a criminal using computing to harm a person, a group, or a company for personal or financial gain.

But is this use of the word correct, or is it a misuse of language?

The word "hack" comes to us from England, and its origin takes us back a thousand years or so, to the district of Hackney, which is now part of the city of London.

At the time, this piece of land was home to a pasture in which a particular breed of horses came into being and itself took the name: Hackney.

This breed was mainly used to pull carriages, and this popular means of transport thus took on the name "hacks," specifically designating carriages that did not belong to great bourgeois families, but worked the streets and could be hired on demand.

The term would eventually fade to become the "taxi" or "taxicab" we know today, but in the 18th century the prefix "hack-" was used to designate a short-term job, often of questionable quality, like "hack-writers."

Note that the English verb "to hack" has also, for hundreds of years, meant to roughly cut up something, a derivative of the word "axe."

It was only in 1959, at MIT's Tech Model Railroad Club, that the term "hack," used by electronics enthusiasts, saw its definition become linked to the fledgling world of computing.

The "Tech Model Railroad Club" is a club where several figures from the history of computing came together, to tinker with electronics in their free time. This club, along with the Homebrew Computer Club, are today legendary clubs in the history of modern computing.

The definition then proposed by Peter R. Sampson is as follows (translated):

"hack: something made for non-constructive purposes; a project done with little rigor; an entropy booster; to produce, or attempt to produce, a hack"

As you can see, at the time, this term had no illegal connotation; it referred to "sloppy" work, but the idea of breaking the law was absolutely not part of it.

But it was in the 1970s that the term began to lose its original meaning, notably with the arrival of electronics enthusiasts (hackers) determined to hijack the telephone network, in the best case to make free calls, or in the worst case to infiltrate large companies using social engineering.

We can notably mention the legendary Blue Box, a device allowing free calls, which brought about the first successes of Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs.

From those years onward, the word gradually began to slip and lose its original meaning in the eyes of the general public, wrongly becoming a term directly linked to criminal offenses.

If we had to give a modern literal translation of the English word "hack," we should today speak of "tinkering," and refer to "hackers" not as criminals, but as "tinkerers" who repurpose the conventional use of certain tools in order to create new possibilities.

It is indeed this vision that led to the popularization of the term "growth-hacker."

To avoid any confusion, computer security specialists have, over the past few years, created new terms to distinguish the different philosophies within hacking:

• "white-hat" refers to security experts who look for vulnerabilities before notifying the companies concerned
• "black-hat" refers to cybercriminals seeking to obtain data in order to exploit, misuse, or resell it for monetary purposes.
• "grey-hat" who use their skills for fun or to troll, without truly intending to cause harm.