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Why is there a noticable influx of what I have dubbed “these people”? People who do not care about ethical hacking, information security, or certification, beyond “I’m being hax0red!”, “Help me hack Gmail/Myspace/Prodigy”, “I want to rob a bank”, or “Obi Won, you are my only hope”?
Can we cut these people off? Find out the Yahoo, or Google, referring information and block it? Or a disclaimer when you sign up that we are information security professionals and if you want your girlfriends Myspace hacked, you will be ridiculed?
I am all for someone who shows an interest in what we do, or wants some pointers, but this is getting ridculous!
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I’ve’ done some searching on my own and the best I can come up with is when you search for “hacking” on Yahoo!, you get a suggested link to “ethical hacking”. Then the first site is EH-Net.. a double edged sword.
On a side note, I found the 1337 version of Google, http://www.google.com/intl/xx-hacker/.
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Fully agreed, although, with Google and the search providers indexing like they do, etc, I don’t see this ending anytime soon. Especially now that these people have already stumbled upon the site. I think best bet would be to have someone(s) monitoring the forums regularly, and deleting such posts / whacking the id’s for the folks posting these. It’s getting ridiculous, to be sure.
Don, maybe take a poll of existing EH-Net’ers who spend a lot of time on here, to see if all agree, then a possibly allow a couple of us (I’d be willing, if others would too, since I can’t spend my ‘entire waking life’ monitoring it 😉 ) enough rights to keep tabs on this stuff, and handle the ridiculous ones.
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Such people won’t disappear and I’m afraid, that there will be even more in future. And I don’t mean people who are at the very beginning and seeking advice, but those who’s only concern is to hack gmail, hotmail, $whatever, destructive things in general to say without knowing anything at all nor the will to proceed on their own in terms of actually learning IT, stuff and ethics.
unsupported: In terms of “I’m being hax0red!” – I think it depends, as such requests for advices as in this example seems to be legit for me, but I assume, you meant the other kind of those, where I fully agree with you.
I’d appreciate if I could help as a moderator too, Don, and not only in terms of this thread’s topic but in general.
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Well I’m still sorta new here, but I agree with you guys. This doesn’t seem to be the right place to ask such questions. And everyone can make their questions or intentions look ethical I guess, while they’re in fact trying to do something bad. I don’t see other options than ignoring and locking their topics.
Maybe there should be some text displayed that clearly states that we don’t help to hack stuff. And if we do, it should be really obvious that the person in question has some experience or is really wanting to learn. Maybe they need some guidelines when posting questions about hacking something.
ZF
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@unsupported wrote:
Or a disclaimer when you sign up that we are information security professionals and if you want your girlfriends Myspace hacked, you will be ridiculed?
@zeroflaw wrote:
Maybe their should be some text displayed that clearly states that we don’t help to hack stuff.
I am sure that such a note within the disclaimer showed at registration or while creating a new thread would be skipped/ ignored by those people, unfortunately.
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@unsupported wrote:
Ok, it’s settled. We should all become moderators! 🙂 We are obviously all dedicated to this board because we are posting on Saturday morning. 🙂
Wasn’t there another thread about privilege escalation? 🙂
Sorry Unsupported, but I started laughing hard when I saw this one. If I had been drinking, it would have to clean my laptop. 🙂
Kidding a side:
A couple people have talked about disclaimers, but what about a new sub forum, something like he employment sub-forum, but for HELP ME HACK kind of stuff. Include a read before posting sticky, and then axe or ridicule those that obviously did not read it. Leave a few of the hack a bank, hack a website, and the like threads at the top and locked, where we have ridiculed people, and show that’s not what we do. Yes, getting the “these people” to post there would be hard, but it’ll give the Mods a place to clear up the clutter in the other sections.I would have posted on Saturday morning, and not in the afternoon but I slept until 11 am, and just got to reading the forums. 🙂
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Part of my job is to be #1 in the search engines to make it more desireable for advertisers. As was pointed out, we’ve done a great job in our rankings. Getting them to fork over money in a bad economy is a story for another time. :'( As was also mentioned, it is a double-edged sword, and those not interested in the profession find us and ask silly questions.
I hear all of you, and you make good suggestions. I do agree with BillV that it come in waves. It’s part of the continuing growth of any site. But after each wave we get a new set of those truly interested. So let’s not jump the gun and make massive changes just because another wave has hit us. Let’s keep our eyes on the positive aspect that people like zeroflaw have joined us during one of those waves. When the wave passes, he’ll stay and the riff raff drop off. Then we mentally prepare for the inevitable next wave. Trust me when I say that if these waves did not come, the site would eventually die.
Being ethical is not easy. Adding to the difficulty is keeping the tone that I have always tried to set on this site: be polite, firm and willing to educate. It also requires having to be diligent and repetitive, but still be nice.
We also want to be a site that helps reclaim the word hacker for the good side. The only way to do that is to let those outside of the profession know that there is a silent majority who are on the right side of the law. We have morals, treat this as an honorable profession and have families, goals, aspirations… none of which is breaking the law. So again, to look on the positive side, every post about hacking Gmail or Facebook is an opportunity to let the masses know that there is a community of hackers that believes we are better than that. And that community is EH-Net.
I think we do a great job in removing spam posts usually within 1 hour (give or take). If there is someone that is going a little overboard or riding the line of unethical behavior, I freeze the topic. I also don’t delete them or many other posts so that others (regulars and non) can see them as an example.
Here’s another suggestion that I had made in one of those posts a while ago… Ignore them. Like children, they will go away. If we get angry, upset, frustrated and eventually rude, then that will end up being the prevailing attitude on the site. And if that happens, then I will have lost my faith in the ethical hacker mindset. If so, then why keep the site going. But I’m much more positive than that, and I believe in all of you.
The history of this site and the compliments I get online, offline, at conferences, in email et al all tell me that this site is truly unique and to please keep the ‘feeling’ going as long as you can.
Let’s keep this conversation going and thank you very much for your dedication especially on a Sat morning!
[align=center:3friiu8n];D ;D ;D ;D[/align:3friiu8n]
Don
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I completely understand and respect the position and comments, Don. Let’s just keep this the right place to be, and I’ll just personally make a mental note to ignore the ‘junk’ that’s been hitting lately. So, let’s just stop replying at all, to those we know are posting for the wrong reasons, and we can hope they just go away, peacefully.
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Thank you Don for the well thought out reply. I understand the balance that must be struck when growing a site like this. I enjoy all the work you and your team does to keep the lights on!
We will continue to provide assistance to those who are truly in need, show anyone who is misguided an alternate (better/more profitable) way, and still have time to laugh at ourselves.
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Yea ignoring them would probably do the trick. Some of them already stopped posting I think. So there’s no need to worry. Thanks Don, for making me feel special ;D Nah, seriously this community seems to be mature and responsible, a good place to hang out. I’ve been around browsing other forums, but most of them talk like elites and generally don’t show each other much respect.
ZF
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The more popular the site, the more asshats you get. Then like some have said, you tend to filter some decent folk out of the influx and get some great contributors. Take the bad with the good.
So would it be unethical to set up a reverse honeypot of sorts and send the kiddies who want to hack myspace and such there? Tell them the answers they seek are found down the deep scary tunnel and that there is candy at the end??
hmmm probably is.
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