Script Kiddie

What is a Script Kiddie?

A script kiddie, or skid, is a term that describes a young hacker who has much to learn yet acts as if he or she knows everything. Most of them are teenagers who are in it for fun and treat hacking as a game. Mostly they hack for bragging rights. They also don’t make a real effort to improve their hacking skills. Most don’t even know how to write a hacking program or ‘script’ and are content to pirate those made by others. This lack of skills often leads to their arrest because they leave a trail that’s easy for investigators to track down.

In Internet slang, “script kiddie” is a derogatory term used to describe a person who uses scripts or codes developed by real hackers to attack a network or website. Script kiddies have little to no coding skills, and rely on available tools or exploit kits to carry out an attack. Script kiddies also go by the term’s variations, such as “kiddie” or “skid.

Script Kiddies Hackers

Script kiddies differ from real hackers because they do not understand source codes in any way. In other words, they do not know how the tools they are running work or even how the attack they are engaging functions. These individuals merely download software to use against targets. But they can move on from being a script kiddie to becoming a novice hacker once they start learning proper programming and know the logic behind the codes they use.

According to LiveOverflow, a dedicated YouTube channel for hacking enthusiasts, the term “kodez kiddies” may have been a possible predecessor to the word. It often functions as a derogatory term. “Kodez kiddies” was mentioned several times in 1994 in Yet Another Bulletin Board System (YABBS), which was published by Alex Wetmore, then a freshman at Carnegie Mellon University.

However, the modern use of the term was associated with an exploit called “crontab.” A forum thread from 1996 retrieved from R00t[.]org revealed a conversation between hackers at the time mentioning “script kiddies.”The term also appeared in two articles in a 1998 issue of Phrack[.]org. The author of the first article described the act of using a port scanner to find hosting vulnerabilities as “script kiddie behavior.” The other occurrence of the term in the publication was in a sarcastic remark about a hacking website that got hacked. To wit, the passage read: “Let’s give out scripts that every clueless script kiddie breaks into thousands of sites worldwide.”

Use in Gaming

The gaming community comprises a tight-knit group of developers, hackers, and cheat-devs who peddle game leaks and cheats to a pool of clients. Script kiddies (also known as “enchiladas”) are this community’s version of “hangers-on.” They infiltrate gaming groups and forums to steal the codes that developers intend to sell. That is primarily the reason why script kiddies gained the ire of the gaming community. The other, of course, is that they don’t have the sophisticated skill set in game design or programming.