Why are hackers called hats?

Why are hackers called as “hats” for example: white hat hackers, grey hat hackers etc?

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It is because … There are different kinds of hackers . And they are differentiated based upon their hats … The white hat is the one who does penetration testing and also known as an ethical Hacker . White hats basically find vulnerabilities (loop holes) in a web application or a computer network to fix them or instead you can say to protect the computer system or a web application from being hacked by the Black hat hackers ( those who you see in the movies ) . Black hat hackers are bad guys , they hack things for their personal gain . Such as money , fun , evil acts , or terror acts … they don’t report the loopholes but insted they exploit them . And now coming to the grey hat , they are neither good nor bad . They hack things for their personal gain sometimes but also help the public . Anonymous is a hacker group ( best example for grey hat ) . for more information visit: http://bit.do/eN8bU

Thank you for your answer but i know the types of hackers. My question was that why are hackers refered to as “hats” and not by any other word. How come the word “hat” suits here? Or why aren’t they just refered as black hacker instead of black hat hacker. I know black “hat” hacker sounds good than just black hacker. So is it the only reason reason or something else also?

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In early 1900s Western movies , which were mostly based upon cowboys often showed heroes wearing white hats and the villans wearing black hats to symoblize the difference between good versus evil.
So this became the stereotype and later a convention . So this is the reason why people denote good hackers with white hat and bad hackers with grey hat . And the big reason why they chose HAT to differentiate is because Hackers always stay anonymous and wearing hats mostly covers them and keeps them unclear to the public .

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thnx for your answer. Doubt cleared now.

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Thx for the participation guys. I’m going to close this topic.

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