A couple weeks ago I was talking to someone about discovering information about hackers. Eventually we came to the approach of counter-hacking (eg. you trace back the attack to IP address X and notice a vulnerability… and then exploit it to find out about the attacker?).
My initial reaction was that it was clearly ethical to counter-hack. Surely, they surrendered any right to protection when they attacked people (there was a fair bit of moral indignation on my part because I was thinking of the, at that time recent, attack on Google that targeted the information of Human Rights activists).
Why, one could even stay within legal bounds by going to another country where hacking isn’t a crime!
It was only later that I realized how this would parallel, for example, the police hacking a suspects computer without a warrant. (more…)
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