Is there a kanji for "hacker"?

Question

As I understand it, most foreign words in Japanese are written in Katakana. However, I am curious as to whether in contemporary written Japanese, hacker is written as a literal adaptation of the western word, or whether a idiomatically Japanese character/concept is substituted in its place.

For the purposes of this discussion, what I mean by hacker is "Person who attempts to subvert the security of digital systems" rather than the wider meaning of the term.

Is this even a concept in contemporary Japanese outside of its status as foreign word?

Answer 1

ハッカー is widely recognized by the general population in the narrow sense OP indicated. But if you use this in, say, Japanese Stack Overflow, it will soon be corrected. "Hey, don't use ハッカー in that way! They're not criminals!"

クラッカー specifically refers to the evil ones, and is preferred by IT professionals.

That said, both ハッカー and クラッカー are still a bit slangy terms in Japanese. Although newspapers seem to use ハッカー freely recently, official government documents still avoid using them. For example, Information-technology Promotion Agency, which is a semi-official organization, does not use ハッカー/クラッカー, and uses other lengthy replacements like 攻撃者、侵入者、悪意のある第三者、悪意のある人…… in its security guidelines.

I don't know why you need a kanji version, but hope this helps.

Answer 2

No. There isn't a single kanji nor a compound which means "hacker". Jisho.org returns no results when searching kanji, and only words containing ハッカー when searching words. People would just rather write new terms in katakana than to create a new kanji for them.

However, as blutorange stated, the Chinese word for it is 黒客 (pronounced hēikè), but of course, that's Chinese and not Japanese.