Social Network for Hackers?
May 25, 2008
I got a real kick out of a tech article about the new House of Hackers social network site. The site says it is supposed to help security researchers get together and help each other collaborate, and behave ethically in the process. That would generally be a good thing. However if they want to establish and maintain credibility as a go to site for quality security research, they really need to up their standards a bit. Frankly from my look around, the notable posts seemed to be primarily wannabes as opposed to a real place to go to to find quality researchers.
Before I go on, I will state that a critical aspect of finding someone you should hire for research is that you are putting an awful lot of faith in their technical ability to find vulnerabilities otherwise missed by teams of skilled developers. I will also note that the really elite hackers/security researchers already have well established networks. It is true that some people might be really talented and need a place to rise to the top.
I spent awhile going through site posts, and it was much more of a social network than a place to find quality researchers. For example, there were many posts telling females how hot they were. One person claimed he wanted to start a company doing security research and randomly invited people to join. One person accepted, but said they had no programming experience. They were promptly offered a position doing social engineering. Yeah, I want to hire that company for critical work.
Ira Winkler
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