House of Hackers social community opens up
PDP, the leader of the Gnucitizen White Hat Hacker outfit announced the opening of the House of Hackers social community yesterday. The House of Hackers is intended 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.
There's been some concern mentioned in the media about this being used as a tool for unsavory elements to recruit hackers, as is noted in HD Moore's comment on a Dark Reading article by Kelly Jackson Higgins:
HD Moore, director of security research for BreakingPoint Systems, says his initial take on the House of Hackers announcement in the blog post is that the recruitment aspect of the House of Hackers could lure the wrong crowd. “If anything, hackers who work in security do all they can to appear professional and trustworthy and that really seems to undermine it,” Moore says. It could end up attracting "'employers'" who aren't interested in the legality of the work they sponsor, he says.
I understand HD's concern, but I tend to think it will be too public a place for that kind of activity. In any case, PDP has asserted that the House of Hackers does not condone illegal activities and is intended simply to provide the community a better way to network. Personally, I'm excited about it. I think it has the potential to centralize some of the distributed threads of knowledge sharing and it certainly provides an interesting format for organizing community activities. I'll leave the details of the community to PDP below:
This post is meant to give the House of Hackers community, future sponsors and clients some ideas on how to make most of the system. I will discuss a few ideas around the social networking platform, its capabilities and use. I am also planning to give you clues about in what way 3rd-party organizations can tamper into the network and perform crowdsourcing, etc. At this very moment, we have 348 members. It’s worth having a read of this article.
First of all, if you haven’t heard yet, House of Hackers is a social network for hackers. From our prospective, 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. If you are interested, please let us know. The market is designed to provide business opportunities to the House of Hackers members in a free, open and fair manner. This is not all, however.
Groups and Formations
House of Hackers provides its community with a wide range of useful crowdsourcing types of services. For example, individual members can form groups. Some people may choose to make their groups wide open for everyone, others may like to restrict them to just a few members they trust. This group thing is very, very useful. For example, such formations can be used in order to setup a small, boutique, penetration testing shops. Through our recruitment network, these shops will be able to run their business and also contribute back and communicate with other members from the community. One of the best ways to find whether certain people or groups are suitable for a particular job is to get the opinion of the crowd. Therefore, the better these groups and individuals perform, the more opportunities they will have.
Events
This feature is extremely useful. If you run an event and you would like get an rough idea how many people will attend, then House of Hackers could help. Just login and setup an event. It is easy and free. It is also very useful because if the event is interesting then people will comment on it and potentially make other people attend as well. For example, I encourage people to attend the HITB MY conference that takes place later this year. On the top of that, event organizers can contact members directly and arrange any further details regarding entrance fees, etc.
Plugins and Network Extensions
Everyone can write applications, widgets and extensions for the network. It is all free and based on Open Social. This means that your applications are reusable. It also means that you can harvest the power of the masses with small clever applications and you don’t have to worry about complicated setups or even accumulating enough users for your needs. I already have a few ideas about useful applications.
The Hacker Recruitment Network
Though the House of Hackers, organizations/companies will be able to hire some of the world’s most talented information security experts, but not only (hackers in general). Organizations who are interested in participating in this initiative get a lot more then just that. They can check the credibility of the person/group they want to hire. It is extremely helpful. Although there are plenty of good Information Security companies out there with solid profile, keep in mind that the project you are spending money on may end up in the hands of unqualified personal. You don’t want that to happen. If you are interested in exploring these opportunity, contact us now.
Funding
If your business needs research or advice in order to get going in certain direction, or it needs customized software for particular needs, House of Hackers can help. You can harvest the power of the hacker network. You can fund particular groups and members. You will be also able to track activities and progress through the plugin framework, and many other things to ensure that the project is getting done. Let us know if you are interested. Funding House of Hackers is much better option then hiring people you don’t know if they will be suitable for your environment.
Sponsorship
Of course, we allow companies to sponsor the social network for a minimal fee. You can put your logo as a sign of support. That way not only your brand will get a good exposure but also you show that your company/organization is supporting intriguing, interesting and rather innovative business ideas. GNUCITIZEN is one of the most recognized WhiteHat Hacker BRANDS online and we fully stand behind the House of Hackers initiative. Let us know if you are interested in such options.
Other
The community is rapidly expanding. Considering the level of creativity involved in the House of Hackers community, we will come up with a lot more ideas very soon.