Visiting the Underground Cracker Culture

No chapter about crackers and their cohorts would be complete without a tour of their gatherings and Web sites, and a sample of their language and culture. Think of it as a sort of exchange program, only better, because you don’t actually have to meet any of them.

Understanding the background and pop culture of cracking will aid you in protecting yourself, especially against cracker con games such as social engineering (mentioned later in this chapter). You might also find it entertaining.

Crackers, particularly script kiddies, have their own language called l33t (leet, short for elite). L33t has nothing to do with real hackers, or perhaps more precisely, real hackers have nothing to do with l33t; it evolved among the users of the old BBS systems and later IRC and Usenet. L33t includes many of the following:

• Intentional misspelling of words, including fone (phone) and phreak (freak)

• Substituting z for s, usually to denote something illegal, such as in passwordz, gamez, and warez

• Using random characters for emphasis: Whatz up d00dz!#!$#$

• Obsessive abbreviation: I got lotsa appz w/docs and codz!#$$#

• Compulsive shouting with all caps: SO IT L00KS LIKE UR YELLIN!!!

L33t also includes some common letter/number substitutions:

• 4 substituted for A: as in H4cker

• 3 substituted for E, as in l33t

• ph substituted for F, as in phreak

• 1 or | substituted for I or L

  On The Web 

  For more examples of l33t, visit Chapter 9 of The Jargon File (version 4.4.7), by Eric S. Raymond, online at www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/index.html.

You’ve probably noticed that l33t has its own unique rules for spelling and grammar. Here I’ve created an example message in l33t followed with a rough translation:

133td00d: A code monkey wedge his st00pid’s gonkulator and the  st00pid is MAD!#!#$$ Lamer can’t rel0ad wind0$e - st00pitude

Rough l33t to English translation:

A low-level programmer broke his boss’s expensive and pretentious  new computer and the boss is mad. He doesn’t know how to reload  Microsoft Windows on his computer.

On The Web 

Visit the L33t-to-English translator at www.eskimo.com/~mvargas/hax0r.htm.