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

7 points by evanprodromou ↗ HN
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.

You think this is a billion-dollar market. But you're sharing it with this competitor and it's a hard slog.

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.

The group wants $50,000. Would you do it? Why or why not?

11 comments

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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.
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.
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.
_ud4a
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
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.
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.
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.

[dead] mapu
No, however there are numerous hacking groups that would perform the same task for as little as $1000
btc_mane
I'd pay you 40,000 to do it. Just Kidding!! Doing some market research?
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.
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.