Hacking is any technical effort to manipulate the normal behavior of network connections and connected systems. A hacker is any person engaged in hacking. The term hacking historically referred to constructive, clever technical work that was not necessarily related to computer systems. Today, however, hacking and hackers are most commonly associated with malicious programming attacks on networks and computers over the internet. Origins of Hacking M.I.T. engineers in the 1950s and 1960s first popularized the term and concept of hacking. Starting at the model train club and later in the mainframe computer rooms, the hacks perpetrated by these hackers were intended to be harmless technical experiments and fun learning activities. Later, outside of M.I.T., others began applying the term to less honorable pursuits. Before the internet became popular, for example, several hackers in the U.S. experimented with methods to illeg...