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
The Origin of ‘Script Kiddie’
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Re: The Origin of ‘Script Kiddie’
#22This 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…
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.
Re: The Origin of ‘Script Kiddie’
#23to lift along with this topic.. the origin of 0-day (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..
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 "0 day AMIGA / PC / CONSOLE / C64".
Re: The Origin of ‘Script Kiddie’
#24I always thought script-kiddies were people who wrote in scripting languages rather than languages that had to be compiled.
Re: The Origin of ‘Script Kiddie’
#25The 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…
Do you know where I could get old IRC logs? I was looking for some but couldn't find any. I guess most of them are not archived anywhere?
IRC logs of #hack etc. would be gold!
Re: The Origin of ‘Script Kiddie’
#26Re: The Origin of ‘Script Kiddie’
#27I always thought script-kiddies were people who wrote in scripting languages rather than languages that had to be compiled.
interesting! I never thought about that somebody might interpret it in this way
Re: The Origin of ‘Script Kiddie’
#28I 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.
Re: The Origin of ‘Script Kiddie’
#29to lift along with this topic.. the origin of 0-day (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..
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 "0 day AMIGA / PC / CONSOLE / C64".
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
Re: The Origin of ‘Script Kiddie’
#30For 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.
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