I hacked my best friend (opens in new tab)

> He briefly removed his subdomain and rethought his security systems. It was a really fun week.

Sorry, it is not fun for your friend unless he had an absolute trust in you, and knew you'd help him remove every backdoor/keylogger/etc.

He may have spent a lot of time securing his machine, time he'd rather have invested in different things.

Seriously, don't do that. Just tell him about the obvious weakness - send a proof of concept if needed.

But a friend is more precious that some cracker creds.

"I needed to stand out, and what better way than hacking into his network?"

The fact that this crosses peoples minds really concerns me. Have we so degraded our respect for things that belong to other people that we're willing to do this as part of a publicity stunt?

To those calling him out for hacking his friend without permission, keep in mind he was a teenager (15) at the time. His friend was of similar age. Teenagers do stupid things, I was of similar age at one point and also did very stupid things.

It's part of growing up.

Saying that, the author needs to give better context.

Cached: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:2zAAkXU...

>Thanks to Google, I didn't even need to crack that hash, I just searched the hash string and found the password already cracked.

Im gonna guess unsalted md5?

Wow, that's seriously messed up if (which I didn't grok in the article) the person did not know that you were trying to help them with their security. The verbiage seems incredibly antagonistic (started to get nasty, etc)...implying a poor friendship at best.

Agreed with the first comment - no fun at all for your friend indeed. The links are good at the end, I've read about a few of those tools even being relatively non-technical. I think more people should have a basic understanding of how to maintain security, but, this doesn't strike me as the best way to teach folks.