"The hackers who want to be recognized for what they do refrain from using l33tspeak," he says. Sophos' Cluley pointed out a rant that was dropped on users' desktops by the W32/Yaha-K worm, written by an Indian hacking group called the Indian mIssIoN iS t0 sPreAd tHe nAmE t0 : mY b3$t fRi3nDĮXp3ct th3 only the lowest echelon of hackers - the so-called "script-kiddies" - would ever write like this, says Joe Hartmann, director of North American AV research for Trend Micro. It also can sometimes show up in the posturing of virus writers. There could be l33t-like wording in the subject line of a spam e-mail message (say, as an attempt to sneak past a spam filter. There are several places where the average IT person might see l33tspeak. "W00t" is also an exclamation, meaning "hooray." Similarly, to say something "0wnz" means it is pretty cool, and "ownage" - er, "0wn493" - is a general exclamation of coolness. If someone says you have been "owned" (written "0wn3d," or even "pwn3d," as somewhere along the way the latter became an acceptable misspelling), it's not a good thing, as it means they have beaten you pretty badly in some fashion. The opposite would be a "n00b" (short for "newbie") or a "lamer" (also "llama"). The word "l33t" itself (also "元37") is really "leet," a corruption of "elite" and meaning someone who is very good at what they do. Just as important as the way stuff is written are the words themselves, as l33tspeak includes a vocabulary all its own. "It does require skill to read and write quickly, especially when you get away from close representations of actual letters," says Elias Levy, architect of DeepSite services at Symantec. It seems pretty straightforward - until you see /-\ |_0 0|= 3X ("a lot of text"). If a word ends in an "s," it probably ought to end in "z" instead, so "wares" becomes "warez" - or, more correctly, "w4r3z." The letter "x" is eminently more l33t than "ck" with another tweak or two, that's how "hacker" becomes "h4x0r."Īgain, there's a lot of flexibility available here, and the writer could choose to stick with letters and symbols where the substitutions are fairly easy to recognize - or the writer could go with an "advanced" l33tspeak, where the characters are "drawn" rather than substituted.įor example, "M" could become "|\/|" and "U" could become "|_|" (see chart for some examples of character representations). The second rule is that certain letters need to be transformed into something cooler, 'Nettier - and frankly, more l33t. The first and most basic rule of l33tspeak is to change certain letters to similar-looking numbers or symbols - for example, "e" becomes "3," "a" becomes "4" or and so forth. 元3tspeak leaves a lot open to the writer's creativity, but there are certain rules of thumb for cracking the code. Since then, it's been overused - mainly by teenagers trying to win respect among hackers - to the point where it has become a source of amusement or annoyance. In the late 1990s, use of l33tspeak made its way into online chat boards and online games. "It's a very quick way of identifying who's in your gang," says Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for security vendor Sophos. Some say it was born of a need to avoid the prying eyes of keyword searches, while others say it was really just a form of graffiti-like expression in a drab, text-based world. 元3tspeak started in the 1980s in the hacker community. They're all part of "l33tspeak" (pronounced "leet speak"), Internet slang that at one time identified the writer as a proficient hacker and now identifies anyone who uses it seriously as a hopeless wannabe. They're words that look unpronounceable: "l33t," "w00t" and "h4x0r," among many others. Even a co-worker might use one - jokingly, of course. They're a familiar sight on chat boards, in spam messages and in viruses.
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