Vigilante Hacking - Heroes or Menaces

[DeepLogic]

This thread is for discussing vigilante hacking. By vigilante hacking I mean doing illegal hacking for reasons the vigilante considers morally right. Should vigilante hacking be legal? Is vigilante hacking even helpful or effective?

[enmafia2]

This thread is for discussing vigilante hacking. By vigilante hacking I mean doing illegal hacking for reasons the vigilante considers morally right. Should vigilante hacking be legal? Is vigilante hacking even helpful or effective?

What is moral or unmoral?
The problem I see with this topic is that everyone has a different point of view. Laws can be better or worse, but they were written with the intention of making an impartial system.

Obviously this is only theory, I think vigilante hacking is applied a lot in real life, specially when stopping attacks.

[DeepLogic]

This thread is for discussing vigilante hacking. By vigilante hacking I mean doing illegal hacking for reasons the vigilante considers morally right. Should vigilante hacking be legal? Is vigilante hacking even helpful or effective?

What is moral or unmoral?
The problem I see with this topic is that everyone has a different point of view. Laws can be better or worse, but they were written with the intention of making an impartial system.

Obviously this is only theory, I think vigilante hacking is applied a lot in real life, specially when stopping attacks.

 
Morality is arbitrary tbh. Which is why I specified the vigilante's sense of morality. So you disagree with vigilantism?

[Insider]

Should it be legal? No I don't agree with that. Either allow all hacking or no hacking at all. Can't be selective.

But morally I do agree that Vigilanté hacking isn't so bad. It's better than ransomware or carding/fraud and all the other more blackhat activities.

Really depends on the case here. For example: Hacking into the government and exposing corruption by sharing emails and illegal govt activities. I would say this is morally right and good for democracy and transparency.

But... a bunch of hackers doxing a dude based on rumours? That would be mob justice and not vigilante hacking.

[enmafia2]

Should it be legal? No I don't agree with that. Either allow all hacking or no hacking at all. Can't be selective.

But morally I do agree that Vigilanté hacking isn't so bad. It's better than ransomware or carding/fraud and all the other more blackhat activities.

Really depends on the case here. For example: Hacking into the government and exposing corruption by sharing emails and illegal govt activities. I would say this is morally right and good for democracy and transparency.

But... a bunch of hackers doxing a dude based on rumours? That would be mob justice and not vigilante hacking.

More or less my point

[QMark]

Should it be legal? No I don't agree with that. Either allow all hacking or no hacking at all. Can't be selective.

But morally I do agree that Vigilanté hacking isn't so bad. It's better than ransomware or carding/fraud and all the other more blackhat activities.

Really depends on the case here. For example: Hacking into the government and exposing corruption by sharing emails and illegal govt activities. I would say this is morally right and good for democracy and transparency.

But... a bunch of hackers doxing a dude based on rumours? That would be mob justice and not vigilante hacking.

I agree.

But I do think if someone started hacking drug king pins that were going around killing innocent people and started throwing those drug kingpins in prison by reporting them to the police anonymously, that would be ethical. Some people say its something out of Mr. Robot but I think it doesn't necessarily have to be that.

If the police can do investigations then so can other people. The OSINT community is a very real thing.

I think that this is hypothetical, but if the purpose was to prevent someone from killing an innocent person or from bullying or hurting an innocent person, I wouldn't be against turning a bully into the police if things got bad enough. Obviously, not several months later out of revenge (which I was about to do unethically to someone until people in this forum brought be to my senses). But what I'm talking about is someone hacking people to go after street gangs and school bullies by turning them into the police.

Depending on how it happened, that could be ethical right? Its certainly possible. It would have to be a preventative measure and not revenge.

I think that hacking the corrupt government to expose them definitely isn't unjustified.

But I do think that all of this in today's age is easier said than done.

[EpochRoot]

The first and most obvious issue when discussing something like this is using completely subjective terms such as "moral". While I realize there are certain things we can mostly agree are generally "moral" there will never be a consensus on what is and is not okay in terms of taking the law into your own hands. I agree that certain things such as whistle-blowing are necessary to shine a light on all sorts of problems the public normally wouldn't be aware of, however I believe that if the "morality" and "legality" of things like this were crossed we would most certainly have a issue! In the end, while I think discussions like this are useful, the act of tagging vigilantism as heroic or menacing is ultimately pointless. It's completely a matter of perspective.

This may not be entirely on topic but I was wondering what everyone's opinion of BrickerBot is. Though it certainly took a sledgehammer approach by going so far as to completely brick devices infected by Mirai, it is an interesting example of "Vigilante Hacking" as referenced by the post's author.

[DeepLogic]

The first and most obvious issue when discussing something like this is using completely subjective terms such as "moral". While I realize there are certain things we can mostly agree are generally "moral" there will never be a consensus on what is and is not okay in terms of taking the law into your own hands. I agree that certain things such as whistle-blowing are necessary to shine a light on all sorts of problems the public normally wouldn't be aware of, however I believe that if the "morality" and "legality" of things like this were crossed we would most certainly have a issue! In the end, while I think discussions like this are useful, the act of tagging vigilantism as heroic or menacing is ultimately pointless. It's completely a matter of perspective.

This may not be entirely on topic but I was wondering what everyone's opinion of BrickerBot is. Though it certainly took a sledgehammer approach by going so far as to completely brick devices infected by Mirai, it is an interesting example of "Vigilante Hacking" as referenced by the post's author.

 
Yes, of course morality is subjective. I'm more asking your viewpoint on vigilante hacking (including your morality) than asking if vigilante hacking fits into some kind of global morality. I'd never heard of brickerbot before. It's really interesting. I think its' methods were a tad excessive. Although if the author wanted to draw attention to the attack (and therefore insecure IoT devices) then he succeeded. There are other ways he could've protected devices from mirai.

[EpochRoot]

Ah maybe I wasn't quite clear, what I meant was that considering something like morality in a scope so large as the entirety of vigilante hacking is ultimately pointless as it's such a large topic with so many different subtypes and examples of each. Hence why I gave a particular example as well, much easier to look at the morality of a single example as opposed to a larger, all-encompassing topic.

Then again I do tend to be caught up in the subjective over objective, it's just my view I'm expressing here obviously including my own hang ups over objectivity.

[DeepLogic]

Ah maybe I wasn't quite clear, what I meant was that considering something like morality in a scope so large as the entirety of vigilante hacking is ultimately pointless as it's such a large topic with so many different subtypes and examples of each. Hence why I gave a particular example as well, much easier to look at the morality of a single example as opposed to a larger, all-encompassing topic.

Then again I do tend to be caught up in the subjective over objective, it's just my view I'm expressing here obviously including my own hang ups over objectivity.

 
Ah ok.l I see. Your input is appreciated btw.