The Art of Professional Hacking

Book excerpt: Hacker is a person who uses his creativity and knowledge to overcome limitations, often in technological contexts. If you ask a random person on the street what a hacker is, they might recall ever seeing the word in connection to some criminal who `hacked' some website and stole for example credit card-data. This is the common image the media sketches of the `hacker'. The somewhat more informed person might think that a hacker is not really a criminal but somebody with a lot of knowledge about computers and security. Of course this second definition is a lot better than the first one, but I still don’t think it catches the essence of what makes one a hacker. First of all, hacking hasn't necessarily got to do with computers. There have been hackers in the Medieval Ages and maybe even in the Stone Ages. The fact that they used other means to express their skills and knowledge doesn't make them less than any hacker in the modern ages. We are just blessed with the fact that at this moment we are all surrounded by technology, a lot of people even are dependent of it.