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The Origin of ‘Script Kiddie’

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Re: The Origin of ‘Script Kiddie’

#61

Post by SmellyGeekBoy »

h2odragon wrote: post #47

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.

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...

Re: The Origin of ‘Script Kiddie’

#62

Post by madsmith »

codetrotter wrote: post #45
Sendotsh wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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

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?

Re: The Origin of ‘Script Kiddie’

#64

Post by ganoushoreilly »

intothemild wrote: post #54
Sendotsh wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yep, I was on IRC from about '93 onwards... I remember it from the mid-nineties, I can't lock down specifics, but I remember the computer I was using at the time. Can confirm the word "skid" too, and searching for any of these words is going to be problematic with all the bullshit l3375p33k.. So good luck using a regex or text search but yeah holy shit winnuke/back orifice... wow that takes me back!

I remember a wave of people popping up in the late 90's when sub7 dropped, as a couple were embedding it in Scene rips and re-distributing them on efnet and dalnet warez channels. Spent a lot of time helping people remove it only for them to re-install with the next Photoshop crack.

Re: The Origin of ‘Script Kiddie’

#66

Post by parliament32 »

Sendotsh wrote: post #32
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…

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…

We called them "skids", so yeah lots of variations.

Re: The Origin of ‘Script Kiddie’

#67

Post by 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

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.

Re: The Origin of ‘Script Kiddie’

#68

Post by pbhjpbhj »

thescriptkiddie wrote: post #50
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW I did grep -riE '(5|s)(c|k)r?(i|1)(p)(t|7)( ?)(k)(1|i)(d{2,3})(y?|(i|1)?(e)?)' ./b/tmp/utzoo-wiseman-usenet-archive/ and got no hits (your original hits lots of usage of "skidding"). Source of that archive is archive.org - https://archive.org/details/utzoo-wiseman-usenet-archive . There are a lot of hits on "kiddies" in comp usenet groups. For example: From: SYSMSH@ULKYVX.BITNET.UUCP Newsgroups: mod.computers.va…

FYI, "skidding" is short for "script kiddie-ing".

Cool, none of the examples I noticed were referencing that AFAICouldT.

Re: The Origin of ‘Script Kiddie’

#69

Post by luckman212 »

codetrotter wrote: post #45
Sendotsh wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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

"I sort of miss typing like this but at the[teh?] same time I don't miss it at all"
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