От Oxford Dictionary of New Words (буквален цитат "cut&paste")

hack: (noun) A person (also known as a hacker) who enjoys using computing as an end in itself, especially when it involves trying to break into other people's systems. Also, an attempt to break into a system; a spell of hacking.

History and Usage: Computing enthusiasts first used this group of words in print to refer to enthusiastic (if not obsessive) use of computers in the mid seventies, although they were almost certainly using them in speech before that. By the early eighties, the 'sport' of breaking into computer systems, whether purely for pleasure, to expose some form of corruption, or as part of a more complex crime, had begun to be reported in the media, and soon appeared to be reaching epidemic proportions. Certainly it is the unauthorized type of hacking that has received greater media exposure, and therefore this set of meanings that has become widely popularized rather than the earlier ones (which nevertheless remain in use among enthusiasts, who still call themselves hacks or hackers). The verb is used either transitively (one can hack a system) or intransitively, often followed by the adverb in or the preposition into. With the almost universal use of computers in the business world and in defence planning and research in the late eighties, the activities of hackers could prove expensive or dangerous to their targets and various measures were taken to make systems hacker-proof or to provide an electronic hacker watch to catch the culprits red-handed. In the UK the Computer Misuse Act (1990) was a formal attempt to limit the damage. The jargon of hackers (enthusiasts or criminals) has been called hackerspeak. A specialized form of hacking practised by youngsters involves breaking the software protection on computer games; this is also known as cracking.