a black hat hacker is a hacker who is interested in doing or actually does bad things... black hats are the bad guys, the attackers, the ones who make things worse for everyone else by breaching the security or corrupting the integrity and reliability of systems... crackers are a type of black hat...
a white hat hacker is the opposite of a black hat... it's a hacker who tries to prevent bad things from happening or from being done... white hats are the good guys, the ones who try to help vendors make their products more secure and users/administrators make their systems more secure... most of the security researchers on the various security lists are white hats...
the two terms come from the old movie stereotype where the bad guy always wears a black hat and twirls his mustache and the good guy always wears a white hat... the colours denote a moral polarity and so as one might expect the concept of shades of grey was introduced with the term grey hat, which is someone who sometimes acts as a black hat and sometimes as a white hat and basically shows no significant alignment with either side...
more recently, microsoft introduced the term blue hat... blue hat doesn't fit into the existing moral color code framework of good/bad/indifferent, and will probably lead to the dilution of the concept because after asking what a blue hat is a person would most likely ask what a red hat is...
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