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The Origin of ‘Script Kiddie’

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Re: The Origin of ‘Script Kiddie’

#11

Post by taneq »

ggm wrote: post #8

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.

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.

Re: The Origin of ‘Script Kiddie’

#12

Post by 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.

Re: The Origin of ‘Script Kiddie’

#13

Post by ACow_Adonis »

Eric_WVGG wrote: post #10
sapphire_tomb wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious then, what did you guess it referred to?

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.

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...

Re: The Origin of ‘Script Kiddie’

#14

Post by rndmio »

exogeny wrote: post #2

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.

mIRC? BitchX from my shell account with trick subdomain, please.

Re: The Origin of ‘Script Kiddie’

#16

Post by 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.

Re: The Origin of ‘Script Kiddie’

#17

Post by spurgu »

INTPenis wrote: post #9

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…

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

To be fair people were anonymous back then so trolling/bullying was easier to brush off.

Re: The Origin of ‘Script Kiddie’

#19

Post by INTPenis »

spurgu wrote: post #17
INTPenis wrote: post #9

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…

> Today it's all bullying and people are going insane over trolling but back then it was just part of the game. To be fair people were anonymous back then so trolling/bullying was easier to brush off.

True in the sense that a kid can't choose to go to another school the next day.

But online they can at least choose to not visit that group anymore.

But not in the sense that we weren't familiar with each other. We knew each other and there were power structures on IRC too where you looked up to certain people. So bullying could be pretty harsh coming from certain players.

Still though, you could just leave the channel. Today kids are using group chats with their neighbor and school chums. So it's a bit more difficult.

Back in my day it was rare to be on IRC with someone from your own town because internet was rare.

Re: The Origin of ‘Script Kiddie’

#20

Post by nefitty »

tptacek wrote: post #5

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 forev…

This is a look at BoW's 1997 response to CBC going after hackers because of the actions of a script kiddie.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/ypw59y/a-brief-look-back-...

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