[ISN] Hackers Join Social Network Craze With 'House Of Hackers'

[InfoSec News]

http://www.informationweek.com/news/internet/social_network/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=207600657

By Thomas Claburn
InformationWeek
May 7, 2008

Hackers now have their own social network. GnuCitizen, a computer 
security consultancy, has set up a social network for hackers called 
House of Hackers on Ning.com

"House of Hackers is a social network for hackers," wrote Petko D. 
Petkov, founder of GnuCitizen, in a blog post on Tuesday. "From our 
perspective, a hacker is a person people express admiration for his/her 
work, skills, creative edge, cleverness, uniqueness, intelligence, etc. 
WE DO NOT PROMOTE CRIMINAL ACTIVITIES. The network is designed to enable 
its members to exchange ideas with each other, communicate, form groups, 
elite circles and tiger/red teams, conglomerate around projects and 
participate in a hacker recruitment market."

Petkov, who signs his posts PDP, expects that House of Hackers will help 
community members form project groups, plan events, find 
security-related jobs, and develop applications, plug-ins, and widgets 
for the network.

Having been built on the Ning platform, House of Hackers can be extended 
using the Google (NSDQ: GOOG)-backed Open Social API.

The House of Hackers main page advises organizations interested in 
working the network's hackers for penetration testing and related work 
to get in touch. "We can assure you that members of this network will 
provide far much better service than any other information security 
company out in the market today," the site boasts.

Since Tuesday, House of Hackers has grown from 348 members to about 850.

Among those joining the network, there's a mix of coders and social 
engineers. In a thread titled "What do you hack?", a person posting 
under the name Hydra acknowledges being a more proficient social 
engineer than coder. Hydra explains, "It is far easier to ask users for 
their credentials than to try and run an exploit."