What is a hack?

Answer 1

One type of hack is something that lets you cheat in a game. You can also hack computers, and many other things. Some of the variations of a hack in a game like Counter Strike are Aimbot, Wallhack, Speedhack and MANY, MANY others. Though I advise you NOT to hack, it is also kind of fun.

Hackers are people who engage in circumventing computer security. This primarily refers to unauthorized remote computer break-ins via a communication network such as the internet (black hats), but also includes those who debug or fix security problems (white hats). Its earliest known meaning in the computer context referred to an unauthorized user of the telephone company network (now called a phreaker).

A hack is also a nonstandard way of fixing a problem. For instance, in the ReactOS project to write an open source clone of Windows, they have the problem of missing functionality in places. So naturally, certain things won't work. So what the developers may do is make a few minor changes here and there to try to trick software into running. That is called hack fixing. The only problem is when they start to fix the underlying problems, their hack fixes no longer work or may cause bugs elsewhere.