In essence, hackers are people who have high ability associated with the exploration of a system. The spirit of hackers is exploration and information disclosure. Hackers are not intended to commit vandalism or anything else that could harm others. As for those who want to destroy and / or just use tools of other people's work, usually referred to as a cracker.
For the history of terminology between hacker vs cracker, I quote from the content of my thesis as follows:
Hacker terminology appeared in the early 1960s among members of the Tech Model Railroad Club student organization at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The group of students is one of the pioneers of computer technology development and they are struggling with a number of mainframe computers. The word hacker first appeared with a positive meaning to call a member who has expertise in the field of computers and able to make better computer prog