25 pcnt hackers FBI?
By Ria

Over the last couple of years, we at Techgoss have worked on a number of articles which required views of the hacking community in our part of the world.  After our initial trepidation, we found most Indian and Pakistani hackers to be very well educated, polite, articulate and driven by a quest for knowledge.  Many openly discourage young hackers from breaking websites and attacking others.

In fact, Techgoss had done an exclusive, in-depth article on how some of the best hackers in India and Pakistan were working together to resolve problems between the two countries.

So, imagine my surprise when I read a Guardian report that  one in four US hackers is an FBI informer, The FBI and US secret service have used the threat of prison to create an army of informers among online criminals

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A quarter of hackers in the US have been recruited by federal authorities, according to Eric Corley, publisher of the hacker quarterly, 2600.The underground world of computer hackers has been so thoroughly infiltrated in the US by the FBI and secret service that it is now riddled with paranoia and mistrust, with an estimated one in four hackers secretly informing on their peers, a Guardian investigation has established.

Cyber policing units have had such success in forcing online criminals to co-operate with their investigations through the threat of long prison sentences that they have managed to create an army of informants deep inside the hacking community.

In some cases, popular illegal forums used by cyber criminals as marketplaces for stolen identities and credit card numbers have been run by hacker turncoats acting as FBI moles. In others, undercover FBI agents posing as "carders" – hackers specialising in ID theft – have themselves taken over the management of crime forums, using the intelligence gathered to put dozens of people behind bars.

So ubiquitous has the FBI informant network become that Eric Corley, who publishes the hacker quarterly, 2600, has estimated that 25% of hackers in the US may have been recruited by the federal authorities to be their eyes and ears. "Owing to the harsh penalties involved and the relative inexperience with the law that many hackers have, they are rather susceptible to intimidation," Corley told the Guardian.

"It makes for very tense relationships," said John Young, who runs Cryptome, a website depository for secret documents along the lines of WikiLeaks. "There are dozens and dozens of hackers who have been shopped by people they thought they trusted."