Hacker's Jargon

see also: regular jargon

Acronym	Meaning	Explanation
1337	Elite	1337speak for the best of the best, often used ironically
Black Hat	Person	A person who tries to abuse, break, enter or use systems or services in a bad way or malicious way - using "black hat trickery" and hacking skills, this is the opposite to the white hat (hacker).
Brute Force		trying every combination of a user/password combination to gain access to services which need credentials
Crack	Software	A specialized software which targets and modifies other software, either by patching, emulation or generation of license keys in order to make a software free to use and or lifting software restrictions.
cracking	Skill	circumventing software restrictions, e.g. copy protection, license checks or artificial limitations; usually supplied and referred to as a crack
DoS	Denial of Service	congesting a networked service so that it can't serve other users
DDoS	Distributed Denial of Service	accessing a service with a lot of machines so it can't service other users
FOSS	Free and Open Source Software	programs which you can run, modify and distribute freely
Hacker	Person	A person who actively tries to reflect, study and master skills and insides in and on various domains, topics and or sciences. Coined from information technology this now rather stands for every possible topic one can practice and reflect on in a deeper way above "the average" (knowledge(s)).
Lockpicking	picking locks	opening stuff which was physically locked before with metal tools
NetSec	Network Security
phreaking		calling a service in an undocumented way, e.g. to gain free access to a paid service
OpSec	Operational Security
RAT	Remote Administration Tool	Software with which you control a vic's PC undetected
RMS	Richard M. Stallman	eccentric GNU tools programming guru who likes to eat stuff from his foot
RE or "reversing"	reverse engineering	the process of analyzing and resembling a software to base parts or writing software which emulates other software's behaviour, e.g. turning closed source software into FOSS
SE	Social Engineering	making people do things without technology
skid	Script Kiddie	Person which doesn't have 1337 skills and only uses tools made by others.
vic	Victim	The soft target (=human) of your hacking attempts.
vuln	Vulnerability	A security hole which allows exploitation
White Hat	Person	A person who uses services and systems in the desired and specified ways, without undermining the service or system itself and tries to promote a "good" tech use. The Black hat (hacker) is the opposite.
Winblows	Microsoft Windows

Jargon File by ESR