HackThisSite

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HackThisSite.org is an online platform that teaches hacking and security in a safe, legal way. It was started in 2003 in Chicago, Illinois by Jeremy Hammond and is now run by a community of volunteers after he stepped back. The site aims to help people learn basic and advanced hacking skills by solving a series of challenges called missions. It has attracted a large following, with well over a million users, and at its peak nearly 20,000 people were online at the same time.

HTS runs a small team of developers and moderators who keep the website, its IRC chat, and related projects running. It also publishes an e-zine called HackThisZine and runs the Hackbloc portal, with hard copies issued by Microcosm and Quimbys. The site’s IRC network is a central hangout for discussions on current events, programming, and Unix topics, with the main channel requiring users to register their nickname to reduce bot activity.

Historically, HTS grew out of a split from CriticalSecurity.Net. Hackbloc forums were once popular but were taken down, and the forums are generally more beginner-focused than the IRC chat. The site aims to attract more experienced users to its forums while still welcoming beginners. Members contribute original articles on ethics, tutorials, and political topics, and the site offers a broad range of missions that simulate real-world hacking scenarios.

The missions are organized by difficulty. Web challenges start with simple authentication tasks, while Realistic Missions simulate more complex websites. Programming challenges ask users to write programs to perform specific tasks, and some challenges involve reverse-engineering or code analysis. There are also logic challenges (which were disabled in 2009) and extended basic missions that focus on code review. In addition, HTS has steganography missions that require finding hidden messages in media files.

While HTS promotes itself as a hacker training ground, it does not endorse illegal activity. Nevertheless, some members have been arrested for illegal actions. The site has faced its share of controversy and internal disputes. In one notable incident, administrators and moderators faced internal conflicts, and the site experienced a major outage after a security breach led some parts of the system to be deleted. Despite these challenges, HTS remains focused on teaching security skills through guided challenges and community discussion.