
The Origin of ‘Script Kiddie’ - LiveOverflow
https://liveoverflow.com/the-origin-of-script-kiddie-hacker-etymology/
======
INTPenis
The author might have had more luck grepping through irc logs from the 90s. If
they exist.

I was also born a bit too late but I was active on IRC during the last 3 years
of the 90s and remember the term script kiddie being so much a part of the
fabric of IRC that we had already started to type around it, so to speak.

For example instead of saying script kiddies I'd just call myself a kid and it
would be implied. Sort of like self-defamation to humble myself before older
irc cats.

The beauty of irc to me was in part its whimsical nature. Making up words was
something that happened almost every day and no one batted an eye.

Also trolling was part of this whole scene and no one cared. Everyone knew how
to handle trolls and if you didn't you were part of todays entertainment.

Today it's all bullying and people are going insane over trolling but back
then it was just part of the game.

IRC was truly where culture existed in my opinion. After newsgroups and such,
IRC was live. It happened every day, all day. And night. In that sense it
would be a much better source for slang terms than zines.

~~~
Sendotsh
It was absolutely in use on IRC in the mid 90s or earlier.

We used it plenty to diss the kids pingflooding their school then saying they
hacked it, or using winnuke or Back Orifice (manually, by installing the
client themselves) on a friend.

If you used a downloaded tool without any interest in how or why it worked,
you were a script kiddy. There wasn’t really a definition or anything, you
just knew.. the person was leet, or they were a skid.

Searching for the term probably won’t help much though as we bastardised as
much text as possible back then. 5cr1p7 k1ddy, sk1d, skiddy, scriptkid, skript
kiddy.. it was essentially a sport to make your text as illegible as possible
while still being able to understand each other. A form of slang I guess.

~~~
codetrotter
> it was essentially a sport to make your text as illegible as possible while
> still being able to understand each other

: 50|27 0|= |\/|:55 7y|*:|\|6 1:|<3 7|-|:5 |3|_|7 47 73|-| 54|\/|3 7:|\/|3 :
[)0|\|7 |\/|:55 :7 47 411

~~~
madsmith
God that took me five minutes to parse... but after you wrap your head around
it, it’s not so bad.

I imagine it was easier to parse out in a monospaced terminal’s font?

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tptacek
This is all pure navel gazing, of course, but:

It goes at least back to Pluvius (in, amongst other places, BoW) in 1994, but
I'm pretty sure he didn't come up with it either --- BoW itself was an ironic
commentary on the whole scene, and wrote casually about "scripts" because
everyone knew what that word meant.

And so what's interesting isn't "script kiddie" \--- "kiddie" has been an all-
purpose pejorative since forever --- but "scripts", which have an interesting
etymology that crosses over between IRC scripts and exploits. "Cookbook" used
to be another related term which has fallen by the wayside.

"Zero day" is another term with interesting roots, originally referring not to
vulnerabilities and exploits but to pirated games; there was a whole
"days"-denominated scale for freshness of warez.

~~~
DEADBEEFC0FFEE
Zero days warez is absolutely where this measure of freshness comes from. The
warez scene was closely linked to hacking because many software packages had
licencing keys and other forms of DRM, and providing the software with the
keygen, or crack was the norm. Good times. So exciting.

~~~
drawkbox
NFO files highlighting groups like Razor 1911, Phrozen Crew, CLASS, FairLight,
DEViANCE and others, fun.

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taneq
> Is "don’t be a script kiddie" a reference to Mr. Robot? Or is it already a
> thing in general?

Wow, wait til they find out how many of the things on Mr. Robot are already
things in general. That's kind of what made the show good in the first place -
that it had relatively realistic descriptions (amongst the theatre, of course)
of how to break into computers.

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ggm
To me the sense was always somebody who _got a script_ and ran it. Not an
author, but a kiddie who knew people who knew people who phreaked.

It was the gateway drug from amiga vid mod devs into hacking but rather than
the hard way (learn to code) they bootstrapped in from somebody elses script.

~~~
taneq
Yeah, that's how we used it. You were a l337 h4x0r if you could actually code
a buffer overflow or whatever. If you just knew how to floodping someone off
the internet, or how to break into a computer using a script you got from
someone who was actually smart, then you were a script kiddie.

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exogeny
For me, the etmyology (and context) of "script kiddies" laid within mIRC
warscripting. Lots and lots of proto-hacker troublemakers creating various
low-level ICMP attacks, ping floods, and so on.

Timeline is generally about the same time as well.

~~~
ACow_Adonis
Indeed. I can't remember whether it was used before then on BBs (it would
surprise me if it wasn't to be honest), but it was definitely in use widely by
the time all the mIRC customisation scripts began to be a thing.

Due to the time-frame and the crowd I hung out with at the time, i can
definitively say that was between '94 and '97.

I would find it very hard to believe that Australian high schoolers were at
the bleeding-edge however, no matter how advanced we were, which tells me the
real origin of the term must be significantly earlier than that...

~~~
jacobtracey
A lot of high school kids, some in Australia were in the top warez groups back
in the day.

Very few people with full time jobs had the time to be super active in the
'scene'. It was almost entirely highschool and college students.

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DonHopkins
I don't know if they were called "script kiddies" then, but I know they were
around in 1986.

[https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/net/hack.board.txt](https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/net/hack.board.txt)

    
    
        >FROM>: MAD MAN HACKER
        >DATE>: WED JUN 26   <34710>
     
        HEY,DUDES TRY THIS VAX COMPUTER->202-xxx-yyyy JUST HIT CONTROL-CHARA AND YOUR
        PRO. GET SOMEWHERE...WELL,LATRE DUDES...
     
         /\>>MAD MAN HACKER..

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mmaunder
That AIX cron exploit looks awfully familiar. Script kiddie was being thrown
around on #hack and #phreak (and probably #2600 and even #warez) on effnet IRC
pre 1996. My guess is someone said it and it stuck and we'll never know who.
Few people used the full phrase. Usually kiddie, k1dd13z, etc.

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pbhjpbhj
A little searching of Happy Hacker related stuff turns up this:

"And you'll know you are vastly better than the "code kiddies" who go to
places like the Scriptors of Doom website to pick up programs (e.g. Perl
scripts) to use to break into people's computers." (Meinel, 1996 [1])

I couldn't quickly find the Scriptors of Doom website to check there.

They say in the OP that Wikipedia has 2000 as the earliest use, but Slashdot
has use a few times in 1999 eg [2] ... perhaps the people writing Wikipedia
hadn't heard of /.

[1]
[http://verbosity.wiw.org/issue6/meinel.html](http://verbosity.wiw.org/issue6/meinel.html)

[2] [https://ask.slashdot.org/story/99/06/05/1815225/ask-
slashdot...](https://ask.slashdot.org/story/99/06/05/1815225/ask-slashdot-
another-word-for-hacker)

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mcv
I think I remember the use of the term 'script kiddie' to refer to wannabe
hackers who run other people's scripts without really understanding them, from
the early-to-mid 1990s, but I don't have any references and it might just as
well be from the late 1990s.

Maybe I'll dig into some of my old HackTic magazines to see if they mention it
anywhere, but I don't think they did. I think I encountered it online on
usenet somewhere, which suggests its use was already pretty mainstream at the
time.

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h2odragon
AOL before it was "A" even had term flagging for some of its chat channels,
saying "script" in some of the Chicago Online text chats would get a moderator
on you in second. "skirpt" didn't. That would have been 1990, 91? Don't think
I saw "script kiddies" used until 94+ in the modern sense.

~~~
SmellyGeekBoy
I think AOL's definition may have been slightly different. I remember getting
a "strike" on my parents' account (3 strikes and the whole account is banned)
for "scripting" in a sense that we'd essentially call a "chat bot" today.

Of course I suppose it depends entirely on the specific chat moderator behind
the report...

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dmschulman
Early 90s for sure, likely cross-pollination from IRC but also brought into
the popular vernacular via programs like AOHell (came out in 1994) and other
GUI frontends for executing a variety of shell scripts that would modify
aspects of your AOL client.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOHell](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOHell)

I think the author of the article is misidentifying the intent of the term
though. Script kiddie has come to mean a person who is enabled by a tool or
interface that allows them to carry out a dangerous or damaging attack on a
computer system while having no knowledge about how to accomplish this attack
via their own means.

I think in the context of the article the "original sources" are moreso
espousing a bit of a programming elitism. Similar ideas but different spirits
of the word.

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ashurov
to lift along with this topic..

the origin of 0-day (zero-day):
[http://bjorn.kuiper.nu/2013/10/09/origin_of_zero_day/](http://bjorn.kuiper.nu/2013/10/09/origin_of_zero_day/)

curious to see if somebody knows (with proof) of an earlier reference..

~~~
d99kris
I don't really have a proper proof but I'm pretty sure I saw the term used
back in the BBS days. Here's one such reference allegedly from 1994
[https://defacto2.net/f/ac2a9c](https://defacto2.net/f/ac2a9c) "0 day AMIGA /
PC / CONSOLE / C64".

~~~
richrichardsson
They do say in that article that 0-day came from warez scene citing Wikipedia.
Here's some text from an Amiga demo dated early 1992 that uses the term "0-day
warez" :
[http://janeway.exotica.org.uk/file.php?id=94232](http://janeway.exotica.org.uk/file.php?id=94232)

~~~
ashurov
the article refers to "The origin of 0-day (zero-day) in hacking (etymology of
zero-day)". Thus not the warez scene. It was taken from the warez scene by the
hackers scene, but the interest is in when the first reference was used within
the hackers scene for so-called exploits that haven't made the public yet or
are so new that they are still referred to as 0-days.

------
pjc50
I went and checked "The Hacker Crackdown" (1992), which surprisingly doesn't
mention the term:
[http://www.gutenberg.org/files/101/101-h/101-h.htm](http://www.gutenberg.org/files/101/101-h/101-h.htm)

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mindslight
Since we're discussing nostalgia, what's still amazing to me is how l33t being
on a T1 connection was, whereas these days that's like half the speed of
crappy Verizon (9x) DSL.

On the other hand, going to eBay and searching Cisco 2501 is a bit depressing.

------
dusted
I always thought script-kiddies were people who wrote in scripting languages
rather than languages that had to be compiled.

~~~
mindslight
Interestingly enough, the term also applied to people who
downloaded/compiled/ran exploits written in C. The distinction was primarily
about the effort put in to understand and learn, as opposed to copying example
commands.

------
brianzelip
On the record collecting / dj side, we used the similar term "Tommy Crate
Digger". See soulstrut.com!

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HNLurker2
Surprised to see liveoverflow posting here

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dagw
Huh. I think that's the first time I've seen what Taran King and Knight
Lighting actually looked it.

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whenchamenia
Term started getting popular around 94 iirc. Check old hacker zines for prior
art.

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whenchamenia
Someone grep a dir of BBS/usenet/gopher era hacker zines.

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nixpulvis
I love how I can't select text on this website on mobile...

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3xblah
I would not have guessed the first use referred to a shell script.

~~~
sapphire_tomb
I'm curious then, what _did_ you guess it referred to?

~~~
Eric_WVGG
Back in the late nineties, I understood the term "script kiddies" as a diss on
users of scripted/interpreted languages vs compiled languages. Mostly in
reference to PHP and Javascript.

~~~
ACow_Adonis
It was used before that as a pejorative to refer to users who loaded/used code
scripts, templates and programs that they neither wrote themselves nor
properly understood. This included those who took other people's
scripts/programs and edited/changed variables and snippets here and there.

It differentiated the 'real programmers' (that is to say, those that could
actually author/write/understand programs and original source) from those who
were, for lack of a better word, code stealers and copiers.

I say this as the kid who undeniably was a script kiddie back in the early 90s
and on irc and got started in coding from doing exactly that from the late 80s
onwards. Can only absolutely place the phrase script-kiddie from mid-90s
however, but might explain why i never did really 'get' what people meant by
scripting language...

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newobj
just came here to confirm this started on IRC for sure.

