31–40 of 69 posts
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.
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…
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.
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…
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…
grep -E '(5|s)((c|k)r?(i|1)(p)(t|7))?( ?)(k)(1|i)(d*)(y?)(i|1)?(e)?'
...or similar.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
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.
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 blee…
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.
"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
[2] https://ask.slashdot.org/story/99/06/05/1815225/ask-slashdot...
https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/net/hack.board.txt
>FROM>: MAD MAN HACKER
>DATE>: WED JUN 26
HEY,DUDES TRY THIS VAX COMPUTER->202-xxx-yyyy JUST HIT CONTROL-CHARA AND YOUR
PRO. GET SOMEWHERE...WELL,LATRE DUDES...
/\>>MAD MAN HACKER..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.underground-book.net/
Hackers (1995) neither -
http://nldslab.soe.ucsc.edu/charactercreator/film_corpus/fil...