Hacktivism
The word hacktivism is a combination of hacking and activism. A hacktivist is someone who uses system penetration to propagate a political, social, or religious message. The targets of such individuals are mostly high profile Web server environments where as many people as possible see their message. 
The level of such a hacktivist is often that of the script kiddy. Because the whole exercise is done to promote the message and not to attack the system, the process of penetration itself is not of particular interest to the hacktivist.
This holds true for most hacktivism. Lately, especially in the conflicts between the United States and China, hacktivism obtained a new face. Hacker groups or individuals ranging from script kiddies and crackers to Black Hats started attacking and defacing Chinese Web sites. The Web pages of political organizations in Afghanistan became targets for hundreds of attackers after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon in September, 2001.
The perpetual debate about naming forced the security community to invent a new system. It refers to people as Black Hat, White Hat, or Gray Hat hackers. Black Hat stands for the bad guys, White Hat stands for the good guys, and Gray Hat describes people sitting in between.
There are many speculations but no proven relations between this terminology and a Linux distributor called Red Hat. The source of this system is early Western movies. Good guys wore white hats, whereas bad guys always had dirty black hats. This color-coded terminology made it easy for the audience to distinguish between the good guy and the bad guy. Unfortunately, the world is not black and white. People referring to themselves as White Hat hackers are interested in computer security for a completely different reason from those that motivate other hackers.
Most security professionals today refer to the average attacker as a cracker. This became a generic term for attackers with medium-level skills and no noticeable ethical boundaries. As with all of these terms, “cracker” is not closely defined but rather changes its meaning from time to time.
As the reader will see in the historical background section, even the term cracker once described a different type of person and had less negative images connected to it.
One of the major differences between script kiddies and crackers is that crackers actually understand some of the technology behind their doings. Their tools do not have to be much more advanced than those of script kiddies, but a cracker usually knows how to use these tools and all possible options. Crackers understand why a particular tool is not working in some cases, and their attacks are less noisy than those of script kiddies. But crackers are not limited to the tools they use.
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