A low-skilled cybercriminal who uses scripts or programs developed by others for attacks without understanding how they work. Script kiddies use ready-made exploit kits or separate programs because they are unable to write malicious tools on their own. Their goal is often simply to impress friends or other members of the hacker community.
Sometimes script kiddies claim authorship of a piece of malware by making minimal changes to its code. The phenomenon is especially prevalent among computer game crackers and cheaters.