Average Joe can contract the services of a hacker

Jan 19, 2015 21:57 GMT  ·  By

A website launched in November promises to connect individuals in need of a hacking job, white or black, with a professional fit for the task.

Called Hacker’s List, the website allows the average Joe to place announcements for a hacking job and the price he is willing to pay for the gig. A number of hackers who have been pre-approved by the service can enter into a bidding competition to receive the assignment.

Different fees for different needs

From the list of projects available on the website, breaking into online accounts (email, social media) seems to be the most frequent type of job posted.

However, it appears that removing content already indexed by search engines is highly remunerated, with someone willing to pay as much as $4,000 / €3,400 for eliminating information from Google, Bing and other search engines.

The legitimacy of the business is controversial since some of the users may simply want to regain control of an email address they own but forgot the access password for it.

On the other hand, others want access to the account of a particular individual for spying purposes.

Scammers are banned from the website

The service, which takes its profit from a commission paid for each project, provides complete privacy (data from billing to details of the task are encrypted using AES 256) and guarantees against fraud.

“Our strict review process ensures that we keep scammers and frauds away. We review every hacker for hire or professional hacker for hire service provider to ensure the highest quality,” reads the description of the service.

In case a professional receives too many complaints, they are banned from the website, without the possibility to rejoin. The details of the reviewing process or how the hackers are identified by the service are unclear, though.

At the moment, the number of registered users seems to be over 3,600, while hackers offering their skills for hire are almost 730. According to a tweet from the service, there are currently more than 700 projects listed. We’ve noticed that some of the announcements date back to December 2014.