The Origin of ‘Script Kiddie’

The Origin of ‘Script Kiddie’(liveoverflow.com)

152 points by LiveOverflow 7 years ago | 62 comments

INTPenis 7 years ago |

The 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.

Sendotsh 7 years ago | |

It was absolutely in use on IRC in the mid 90s or earlier.

We used it plenty to diss the kids pingflooding their school then saying they hacked it, or using winnuke or Back Orifice (manually, by installing the client themselves) on a friend.

If you used a downloaded tool without any interest in how or why it worked, you were a script kiddy. There wasn’t really a definition or anything, you just knew.. the person was leet, or they were a skid.

Searching for the term probably won’t help much though as we bastardised as much text as possible back then. 5cr1p7 k1ddy, sk1d, skiddy, scriptkid, skript kiddy.. it was essentially a sport to make your text as illegible as possible while still being able to understand each other. A form of slang I guess.

codetrotter 7 years ago | | |

> it was essentially a sport to make your text as illegible as possible while still being able to understand each other

: 50|27 0|= |\/|:55 7y|*:|\|6 1:|<3 7|-|:5 |3|_|7 47 73|-| 54|\/|3 7:|\/|3 : [)0|\|7 |\/|:55 :7 47 411

phaemon 7 years ago | | |

Searching should work as long as you're happy to kiboze with:

grep -E '(5|s)((c|k)r?(i|1)(p)(t|7))?( ?)(k)(1|i)(d*)(y?)(i|1)?(e)?'

...or similar.

intothemild 7 years ago | | |

Yep, I was on IRC from about '93 onwards... I remember it from the mid-nineties, I can't lock down specifics, but I remember the computer I was using at the time.

Can confirm the word "skid" too, and searching for any of these words is going to be problematic with all the bullshit l3375p33k.. So good luck using a regex or text search

but yeah holy shit winnuke/back orifice... wow that takes me back!

parliament32 7 years ago | | |

We called them "skids", so yeah lots of variations.

spurgu 7 years ago | |

> Today it's all bullying and people are going insane over trolling but back then it was just part of the game.

To be fair people were anonymous back then so trolling/bullying was easier to brush off.

SmellyGeekBoy 7 years ago | | |

I've been on the internet since 1995, FWIW. My understanding of "trolling" at the time just meant deliberately saying stupid or obviously false stuff to get a rise out of people. It wasn't malicious, just a form of sport and when you realised you were on the receiving end often played along as a form of meta-trolling.

When I see "trolling" used to describe death threats or mocking someone's dead relatives on social media it just doesn't sit right with me. I guess language evolves but we already had perfectly good words like "harassment" and "bullying" to describe these activities. It really takes away from the light-hearted fun and games that the word used to embody.

rootusrootus 7 years ago | | |

Maybe for the general population. For those of us deep into the early Internet, it wasn't all that anonymous and a lot of people absolutely took it personally. In many ways, due to the significantly smaller group of people, it was a lot worse if you found yourself on the wrong side of things.

It just didn't make the news or get talked about in school because regular folks had no idea what was going on.

INTPenis 7 years ago | | |

True in the sense that a kid can't choose to go to another school the next day.

But online they can at least choose to not visit that group anymore.

But not in the sense that we weren't familiar with each other. We knew each other and there were power structures on IRC too where you looked up to certain people. So bullying could be pretty harsh coming from certain players.

Still though, you could just leave the channel. Today kids are using group chats with their neighbor and school chums. So it's a bit more difficult.

Back in my day it was rare to be on IRC with someone from your own town because internet was rare.

TeMPOraL 7 years ago | | |

Depends. IME on IRC people usually were pseudonymous, not anonymous, and built reputations around their handles - reputations which sometimes were as important (or for us youngsters more important) than meatspace one.

LiveOverflow 7 years ago | |

Do you know where I could get old IRC logs? I was looking for some but couldn't find any. I guess most of them are not archived anywhere?

IRC logs of #hack etc. would be gold!

BuildTheRobots 7 years ago | | |

It's a shame http://bash.org/ isn't datestamped.

MentallyRetired 7 years ago | | |

Oh god, I hope not. My webarchived geocities from 1997 is cringy enough. I don't need to remember what I was saying on EFNet in 1993.

tptacek 7 years ago |

This 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.

DEADBEEFC0FFEE 7 years ago | |

Zero days warez is absolutely where this measure of freshness comes from. The warez scene was closely linked to hacking because many software packages had licencing keys and other forms of DRM, and providing the software with the keygen, or crack was the norm. Good times. So exciting.

drawkbox 7 years ago | | |

NFO files highlighting groups like Razor 1911, Phrozen Crew, CLASS, FairLight, DEViANCE and others, fun.

nefitty 7 years ago | |

This is a look at BoW's 1997 response to CBC going after hackers because of the actions of a script kiddie.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/ypw59y/a-brief-look-back-...

tptacek 7 years ago | | |

For whatever it's worth, BoW in '97 is pretty different than BoW in '94.

taneq 7 years ago |

> Is "don’t be a script kiddie" a reference to Mr. Robot? Or is it already a thing in general?

Wow, wait til they find out how many of the things on Mr. Robot are already things in general. That's kind of what made the show good in the first place - that it had relatively realistic descriptions (amongst the theatre, of course) of how to break into computers.

ggm 7 years ago |

To 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.

taneq 7 years ago | |

Yeah, that's how we used it. You were a l337 h4x0r if you could actually code a buffer overflow or whatever. If you just knew how to floodping someone off the internet, or how to break into a computer using a script you got from someone who was actually smart, then you were a script kiddie.

wccrawford 7 years ago | |

It wasn't just someone who got a script and ran it. It was someone who acted like they were an elite hacker, but all they had were a collection of scripts that other people wrote.

exogeny 7 years ago |

For 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.

ACow_Adonis 7 years ago | |

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...

jacobtracey 7 years ago | | |

A lot of high school kids, some in Australia were in the top warez groups back in the day.

Very few people with full time jobs had the time to be super active in the 'scene'. It was almost entirely highschool and college students.

rndmio 7 years ago | |

mIRC? BitchX from my shell account with trick subdomain, please.

DonHopkins 7 years ago |

I don't know if they were called "script kiddies" then, but I know they were around in 1986.

https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/net/hack.board.txt

    >FROM>: MAD MAN HACKER
    >DATE>: WED JUN 26   <34710>
 
    HEY,DUDES TRY THIS VAX COMPUTER->202-xxx-yyyy JUST HIT CONTROL-CHARA AND YOUR
    PRO. GET SOMEWHERE...WELL,LATRE DUDES...
 
     /\>>MAD MAN HACKER..

mmaunder 7 years ago |

That AIX cron exploit looks awfully familiar. Script kiddie was being thrown around on #hack and #phreak (and probably #2600 and even #warez) on effnet IRC pre 1996. My guess is someone said it and it stuck and we'll never know who. Few people used the full phrase. Usually kiddie, k1dd13z, etc.

pbhjpbhj 7 years ago |

A little searching of Happy Hacker related stuff turns up this:

"And you'll know you are vastly better than the "code kiddies" who go to places like the Scriptors of Doom website to pick up programs (e.g. Perl scripts) to use to break into people's computers." (Meinel, 1996 [1])

I couldn't quickly find the Scriptors of Doom website to check there.

They say in the OP that Wikipedia has 2000 as the earliest use, but Slashdot has use a few times in 1999 eg [2] ... perhaps the people writing Wikipedia hadn't heard of /.

[1] http://verbosity.wiw.org/issue6/meinel.html

[2] https://ask.slashdot.org/story/99/06/05/1815225/ask-slashdot...

mcv 7 years ago |

I think I remember the use of the term 'script kiddie' to refer to wannabe hackers who run other people's scripts without really understanding them, from the early-to-mid 1990s, but I don't have any references and it might just as well be from the late 1990s.

Maybe I'll dig into some of my old HackTic magazines to see if they mention it anywhere, but I don't think they did. I think I encountered it online on usenet somewhere, which suggests its use was already pretty mainstream at the time.

h2odragon 7 years ago |

AOL before it was "A" even had term flagging for some of its chat channels, saying "script" in some of the Chicago Online text chats would get a moderator on you in second. "skirpt" didn't. That would have been 1990, 91? Don't think I saw "script kiddies" used until 94+ in the modern sense.

SmellyGeekBoy 7 years ago | |

I think AOL's definition may have been slightly different. I remember getting a "strike" on my parents' account (3 strikes and the whole account is banned) for "scripting" in a sense that we'd essentially call a "chat bot" today.

Of course I suppose it depends entirely on the specific chat moderator behind the report...

dmschulman 7 years ago |

Early 90s for sure, likely cross-pollination from IRC but also brought into the popular vernacular via programs like AOHell (came out in 1994) and other GUI frontends for executing a variety of shell scripts that would modify aspects of your AOL client.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOHell

I think the author of the article is misidentifying the intent of the term though. Script kiddie has come to mean a person who is enabled by a tool or interface that allows them to carry out a dangerous or damaging attack on a computer system while having no knowledge about how to accomplish this attack via their own means.

I think in the context of the article the "original sources" are moreso espousing a bit of a programming elitism. Similar ideas but different spirits of the word.

ashurov 7 years ago |

to lift along with this topic..

the origin of 0-day (zero-day): http://bjorn.kuiper.nu/2013/10/09/origin_of_zero_day/

curious to see if somebody knows (with proof) of an earlier reference..

d99kris 7 years ago | |

I don't really have a proper proof but I'm pretty sure I saw the term used back in the BBS days. Here's one such reference allegedly from 1994 https://defacto2.net/f/ac2a9c "0 day AMIGA / PC / CONSOLE / C64".

richrichardsson 7 years ago | | |

They do say in that article that 0-day came from warez scene citing Wikipedia. Here's some text from an Amiga demo dated early 1992 that uses the term "0-day warez" : http://janeway.exotica.org.uk/file.php?id=94232

pjc50 7 years ago |

I went and checked "The Hacker Crackdown" (1992), which surprisingly doesn't mention the term: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/101/101-h/101-h.htm

mindslight 7 years ago |

Since we're discussing nostalgia, what's still amazing to me is how l33t being on a T1 connection was, whereas these days that's like half the speed of crappy Verizon (9x) DSL.

On the other hand, going to eBay and searching Cisco 2501 is a bit depressing.

dusted 7 years ago |

I always thought script-kiddies were people who wrote in scripting languages rather than languages that had to be compiled.

mindslight 7 years ago | |

Interestingly enough, the term also applied to people who downloaded/compiled/ran exploits written in C. The distinction was primarily about the effort put in to understand and learn, as opposed to copying example commands.

LiveOverflow 7 years ago | |

interesting! I never thought about that somebody might interpret it in this way

brianzelip 7 years ago |

On the record collecting / dj side, we used the similar term "Tommy Crate Digger". See soulstrut.com!

HNLurker2 7 years ago |

Surprised to see liveoverflow posting here

dagw 7 years ago |

Huh. I think that's the first time I've seen what Taran King and Knight Lighting actually looked it.

whenchamenia 7 years ago |

Term started getting popular around 94 iirc. Check old hacker zines for prior art.

whenchamenia 7 years ago |

Someone grep a dir of BBS/usenet/gopher era hacker zines.

nixpulvis 7 years ago |

I love how I can't select text on this website on mobile...

3xblah 7 years ago |

I would not have guessed the first use referred to a shell script.

sapphire_tomb 7 years ago | |

I'm curious then, what did you guess it referred to?

Eric_WVGG 7 years ago | | |

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.

newobj 7 years ago |

just came here to confirm this started on IRC for sure.

From: SYSMSH@ULKYVX.BITNET.UUCP Newsgroups: mod.computers.vax Subject: how to stomp on your kiddies Message-ID: <8605210414.AA16691@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU> Date: Thu, 15-May-86 16:48:00 EDT

>FROM>: MAD MAN HACKER >DATE>: WED JUN 26 <34710> HEY,DUDES TRY THIS VAX COMPUTER->202-xxx-yyyy JUST HIT CONTROL-CHARA AND YOUR PRO. GET SOMEWHERE...WELL,LATRE DUDES... /\>>MAD MAN HACKER..