Grey Hats 

T.K. McNeil 

Language is an interesting thing. The English language in particular. Of all the languages used by humans, English is, grammatically,the most complicated, many native speakers getting much of it wrong most of the time, and the most lexically vast. There are more individual words in English than in any other living language. Even so, there are still many occasions when even it falls short and a single term comes to describe many different things in the public imagination. One such term is the current use of the word "hacker."

Applied to everyone from gamers using cheat-codes to those who perpetrate system breaches on banking systems, the terms “hack” and “hacker”, particularly as deployed by law enforcement officials, has become essentially meaningless. What is more, there are alternatives and qualifiers available for those concerned enough with accuracy to use them. The people using game cheat-codes are not really “hackers” at all. While this could be considered a hack in the expanded definition which includes any sort of short-cut. They are really just savvy gamers. The teams of programmers working to take down firewalls on Chinese networks to allow freer access to information there are better refereed to as “White Hat” Hackers or “Hacktivists”, a contraction of “hacker” and “activist”. This term has also been used variously for Wikileaks founder Julian Assange and Anonymous.

Those using their network-breaching skills to a criminal end, such as data destruction or theft, as happened with the Ashley Madison break-in, or even just the dissemination of official looking but misleading information are usually called “BlackHats”, “Darkside Hackers” or “Crackers”, a usage similar to safe-cracker in the olden days. To be called any of these three by someone in the Hacker community is usually taken, at the very least, as a personal slight.

A bit more nebulous are those inhabiting the shades of grey between WhiteHats and Crackers. This group, while not always working for the greater good like WhiteHats/Hactivists, are also not fully nefarious like Crackers/BlackHats.

While they may use identical methods to the usually recognized groups, the purpose of the majority of hackers is simply to surf and connect. To go into a system to see if they can and snatch a random stream of data while they are there simply for bragging rights.

Despite being “criminals” in the eyes of the law and in many cases, such as that of Kevin Mitnick, serving up to nine years in prison, their actions are most often victimless.

Unless you count a few bruised egos. Though it is rather telling that this is also the type most likely to go into cyber-security after being released from prison, keeping other far more dangerous hackers from doing what they would ordinarily do.

It would therefore best to come up with a new term for the majority in the middle. Somewhere between the crusading Hactivist and shadowy cracker. In my humble opinion a term such as “Grey Hat” or “Seeker” would fit the bill nicely.