Black Hat

A tool which can be used without needing to understand how it works. Among electronic security professionals, this is a generic term for a pre-packaged piece of software which checks a target system against a list of known vulnerabilities. Some people have been known to declare themselves sec crackers simply because they have such an application and know how to enter an address and press the 'Start' button; real professionals have nothing but contempt for someone who uses this.

On shadownets, this term has spread to refer to any field: A Black Hat is someone who says "I am a <career>" when they mean "I have a tool which automatically does basic <skill>". This usage may cause some confusion when talking with security specialists, who insist the term only refers to their industry, and describes the application rather than the user.

On certain echoes, most notably Help:SecSec (where a thread started in <date>Neovembar 851</date> is still active), it is common to find arguments between security people and everyone else over which group spawned the term first: Both believe that the other meaning was originally derived from the one they are familiar with. It has also been suggested (although this usage hasn't been recorded in the real world) that some engineers coined the term to refer to someone who only knows how to use Black Girders.