In the book, Hacking: The Art of Exploitation, author Jon Erickson addresses the connotations, i.e. associations, emotions, or ideas that are implied by the word “hacker.” When most people think of hackers, they think of criminals with dyed hair and piercings breaking the law. However, he states that the actual definition of hacking is “finding unintended ways or overlooked uses for the laws and properties of a given situation and then applying them in new and inventive ways to solve a problem.” (p. 1) The word hacker was created in the 1950s by MIT’s model railroad club who used old telephone equipment to rig up complex systems to control the model train track and they called it hacking. The club proceeded to get into programming and the early hackers were just people who found more elegant solutions to programming problems. Interestingly, the word cracker emerged as a way to denote bad hackers. 

Regarding workplace deviance, hacking used to be viewed as a highly illegal and terrible thing, but that view is changing. For example, in  2001, a professor at Princeton found a vulnerability in watermarking controls. But before it was published they were threatened by companies that used the software because the Digital Millenium Copyright Act of 1998 forbids any discussion of bypassing industry consumer controls (Erickson p. 3).  The main reason why hacking is now an acceptable career is that our society has realized that hackers are the driving force in developing more secure systems. We now implement attacking and defending hackers that work together to build stronger intrusion detection systems (IDS). Vulnerabilities found by the attackers can be fixed by the defenders. In the past few years, many companies have also started bug bounty programs that employ black hat hackers, and provide a reward if they can hack a system. This drastically increases the security of a system because there is now a greater chance that vulnerabilities have been found by someone else and patched before a malicious actor can exploit it.   

Sources

Jon Erickson. 2008. Hacking: the art of exploitation, 2nd edition (Second. ed.). No Starch Press, USA.