The Origin of ‘Script Kiddie’
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The Origin of ‘Script Kiddie’
1–10 of 69 posts
Re: The Origin of ‘Script Kiddie’
#2For 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.
Re: The Origin of ‘Script Kiddie’
#3I would not have guessed the first use referred to a shell script.
Re: The Origin of ‘Script Kiddie’
#4For 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 bleeding-edge however, no matter how advanced we were, which tells me the real origin of the term must be significantly earlier than that...
Re: The Origin of ‘Script Kiddie’
#5This 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 forever --- but "scripts", which have an interesting etymology that crosses over between IRC scripts and exploits. "Cookbook" used to be another related term which has fallen by the wayside.
"Zero day" is another term with interesting roots, originally referring not to vulnerabilities and exploits but to pirated games; there was a whole "days"-denominated scale for freshness of warez.
Re: The Origin of ‘Script Kiddie’
#6I would not have guessed the first use referred to a shell script.
I'm curious then, what did you guess it referred to?
Re: The Origin of ‘Script Kiddie’
#7Re: The Origin of ‘Script Kiddie’
#8To 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.
Re: The Origin of ‘Script Kiddie’
#9The 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 of like self-defamation to humble myself before older irc cats.
The beauty of irc to me was in part its whimsical nature. Making up words was something that happened almost every day and no one batted an eye.
Also trolling was part of this whole scene and no one cared. Everyone knew how to handle trolls and if you didn't you were part of todays entertainment.
Today it's all bullying and people are going insane over trolling but back then it was just part of the game.
IRC was truly where culture existed in my opinion. After newsgroups and such, IRC was live. It happened every day, all day. And night. In that sense it would be a much better source for slang terms than zines.
Re: The Origin of ‘Script Kiddie’
#10I would not have guessed the first use referred to a shell script.
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.