

Would you pay black-hat hackers to take down a competitor's site? - evanprodromou

Hypothetical scenario: let's say you and a competitor are neck-and-neck in a really tough market. Say, you're Gowalla.com and they're Foursquare. You're Wesabe, they're Mint.<p>You think this is a billion-dollar market. But you're sharing it with this competitor and it's a hard slog.<p>A hacker group contacts you and offers to harass the rival site -- maybe do a security attack and expose user email addresses and passwords, or maybe just a brutal DDOS that will make the service unreliable.<p>The group wants $50,000. Would you do it? Why or why not?
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evanprodromou
My answer's no on this, by the way. It's probably a federal crime, and it
would probably derail _your_ startup (and the rest of your career) if you were
ever caught or even suspected. Also, I'm in this to build things, not to mess
up what other people are building. But I don't think everyone feels that way.

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badclient
This was fairly common in the spamming industry. They call it joe-jobbing. The
way it works is when you run a site that is promoted by spam, you need special
hosting that costs 10-30x more and can tolerate complaints. Let's say you have
a competitor or someone annoying, you goto his corporate site and pay someone
couple hundred bucks to email millions of people linking to your
competitor/enemy's site that isn't on spam-proof host. The host will get
complaints about that site for spamming and pull it down.

It's a pretty petty thing and doesn't really accomplish much in the long run.

Fineprint: much of my knowledge is almost a decade old.

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vannevar
Why not? Aside from being utterly unethical, it's a serious federal crime here
in the US, punishable by up to ten years in prison (see Title 18 U.S.C Section
1030). I imagine it's also a crime in most other nations.

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gabaix
Most of the times doing bad things do not yield more results than doing good
things, and highly increase your risk. Attacking a competitor's site is a sure
loss for the perpetuator, in my opinion.

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evanprodromou
I've really enjoyed the responses to this question. I have yet to hear a
single person say, "I'd consider it..." or even "It would depend..." It's been
almost universally "No way."

I'm going to try to pull together a blog post that summarizes the responses.
Some have surprised me.

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davyjones
Such a move is highly unethical not to mention illegal in most countries. I
would sincerely suggest that they just make their product/service better. That
is the only ethical way to stay ahead of the pack.

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ropman76
No. While a security breach would do a good job of knocking a competitor off
the hackers would still have emails and money transfers from you to them that
could be used as leverage at a later day.

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samlev
I have seen some rather shady people, who would probably pay for this type of
thing, but those people are very, _very_ unlikely to be offering a real,
viable alternative.

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soho33
i would never even think about going that route. It's always best in the long
run to try to outperform your competitor by offering better service, customer
support and just better product in general. I always live by the old saying
"treat others the way you like to be treated". beside, how would you know that
the same group didn't contact the other company as well?! so this way they
would get $100,000 and take down both sites lol

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btc_mane
I'd pay you 40,000 to do it. Just Kidding!! Doing some market research?

