Script Kiddie

About

"Script Kiddie" (also known as Script Bunny, Skiddie or Script Kitty) is a pejorative term for an unskilled hacker who relies heavily on third-party scripts or programs to wage a cyberattack on networks, systems and websites.

Origin

While the exact origin of the term "script kiddie" is unknown, the hacker zine Phrack^[2] used the term in Volume 8, Issue 54 released on December 25th, 1998 when discussing the practice of "Remote OS detection vis TCP/IP Stack FingerPrinting."

"Then when someone posts (say) a root
hole in Sun's comsat daemon, our little cracker could grep his list for
'UDP/512' and 'Solaris 2.6' and he immediately has pages and pages of rootable boxes. It should be noted that this is SCRIPT KIDDIE behavior."

Spread

On July 21st, 2000, security professional Lance Spitzner released a paper titled "The Tools and Methodologies of the Script Kiddie."^[5] On November 1st, 2001, Urban Dictionary^[3] user Keith Jesus Wilcox submitted an entry for "script kiddie," defining it as "a person who downloads exploits, but does not understand or respect them." In November 2005, the Software Engineering Institute^[4] at Carnegie Melon University released a technical report titled "Security Quality Requirements Engineering," which mentioned script kiddies as "the more immature but unfortunately often just as dangerous exploiter of security lapses on the Internet." On November 4th, 2008, the infomation technology blog Dow.ngra.de^[7] published an article titled "Script kiddies have awesome tools," which was subsequently submitted to the /r/programming^[8] subreddit later that week. On January 26th, 2013, YouTuber jackfrags uploaded footage from the online survival game DayZ titled "Understanding Script Kiddies" (shown below, left). In the first two years, the video gained over 3.4 million views and 3,400 comments. On November 16th, the HackersOnBoard YouTube channel posted a panel from the hacker conference Defcon titled "Defense by numbers: Making Problems for Script Kiddies and Scanner Monkeys" (shown below, right).

Script Kiddie Tools

Script kiddies are often associated with various ready-made hacking tools, including the denial of service (DoS) program WinNuke,^[6] the distributed denial of service tool (DDoS) Low Orbit Ion Cannon (LOIC) and remote administration tools like BackOrifice or Beast.

Search Interest

External References