I love it when you receive a spam message that you just couldn’t make up. Yes, I woke up this morning to discover an invitation to attend a ethical hacking course for the low fee of just 3,000 Egyptian Pounds (~500 US Dollars).
What a bargain! I guess the first reason I paid attention at all was the use of the term ethical hacking. What is ethical hacking? Have I been doing it wrong all these years?
Is that like ethical accounting? Ethical plumbing? Now don’t get me wrong, I understand that for the vast majority of the unwashed masses the word hacker is pejorative, but if you were an actual hacker who wanted to teach me wouldn’t you know better?
Now I am sure my colleague Graham Cluley will pipe up in the comments to defend the negativity used in the media surrounding the term hacker, but to me it just ticks me off.
The best part of this email? It was sent to me by Shady Ahmed. If you are going to spam people claiming you offer ethical training, perhaps you should alter the random fake email address list to omit all references to Shady, Dodgy, Slippery, Adolph and Ahmadinejad.
Now if you really want to learn about hacking you are probably better off taking advantage of training from our non-spamming friends over at SANS.
Perhaps SEC 517: Cutting-Edge Hacking might be a good place to start.
This whole incident did remind me of the old gag from Mozilla’s bug-tracker about Honest Achmed’s Used Cars and Certificates applying to be a Certificate Authority in the Firefox browser.
Browse over and read it for a light-hearted laugh about the fragility of the certificate issuance business.
As for me? I’m proud to be a hacker and I will be signing up for an ethical hacking course just as soon as Honest Achmed and I get this certificate business off the ground…
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