The term was coined by author/critic Jason Logan King Sack in an article about media artist Shu Lea Cheang. Acts of hacktivism are carried out in the belief that proper use of code will have leveraged effects similar to regular activism or civil disobedience.

If the destination host or the destination network is down there is no way to get an answer and if TTL (Time To Live) is set too low the UDP packets will "die" before reaching the host because of too many hops between the scanning computer and the target. The TCP receive window size is the amount of received data (in bytes) that can be buffered during a connection. The sending host can send only that amount of data before it must wait for an acknowledgment and window update from the receiving host and ICMP is mainly used for echo requests and not in port scans.

Also known as a footbath, a sheepdip is the process of checking physical media, such as floppy disks or CD-ROMs, for viruses before they are used in a computer. Typically, a computer that sheepdips is used only for that process and nothing else and is isolated from the other computers, meaning it is not connected to the network. Most sheepdips use at least two different antivirus programs in order to increase effectiveness.

Netcraft is providing research data and analysis on many aspects of the Internet. Netcraft has explored the Internet since 1995 and is a respected authority on the market share of web servers, operating systems, hosting providers, ISPs, encrypted transactions, electronic commerce, scripting languages and content technologies on the internet.

Sending a bogus email is one way to find out more about internal servers. Also, to gather additional IP addresses and learn how they treat mail.