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Editor’s Note: The following is not meant to be an exhaustive list of Internet terms but rather a useful collection of core concepts needed to understand cyberwarfare.
Altruism: a broad and indistinct category of hacker motivations characterized by a subjective conception of “doing good.”
Black Hat (also Dark Side Hacker): a malicious or criminal hacker.
Bot: a piece of software that automates routine, repetitive tasks and performs them much more quickly than a human operator could. A given bot may or may not be malicious, depending on how it is used. In the context of cyberwarfare, the term refers specifically to a parasitic program that hijacks a networked computer and uses it to carry out automated cyberattacks on behalf of a hacker. Individual bots can be building blocks for powerful conglomerations of bots known as botnets or bot armies. A computer wholly or partially controlled by a bot is known as a “zombie.”
Bot Herder (also Bot Wrangler): a program designed to produce bots autonomously, a tedious and time-consuming process for a human hacker. A bot herder can replicate itself and create additional bot herders as well as bots.
Botnet (also Bot Army): a collective computing network consisting of many bots and bot herders under the control of a single hacker, giving him or her access to the computing power of many thousands of machines simultaneously.
Coder (also Writer): a programmer who is the primary creator of viruses, worms and other malware used by hackers. The ability to write code is a handy skill for any hacker to have, but it is not absolutely essential.
Cracker: a user who attempts to bypass copyright protections on software and digital media, thus making programs and applications more accessible in the hacker community as a whole.
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