A long time ago, when I decided to get the EC Council “Certified Ethical Hacker” certification done, I couldn’t imagine what type of job offers and requests I would start getting after adding it to my Freelancer profile. People started asking me about a lot of illegal things. And over the years nothing has changed, still almost every day I get some strange requests I now just tend to ignore, not even turn down with a reply.

Initially it seemed strange to receive on a daily basis requests to break into some ones Facebook, Twitter or Instagram account or bug their smart device. Eventually I got used to it, but still some of the requests are stranger than others and make me scratch my head..

Mostly people ask to spy on their life partners/family/close ones, because they think they are being cheated on and to them this makes the privacy invasion & illegal actions ethical. Those are just the regular everyday ones and somewhat relatable as an emotional outburst- yet still a bit creepy people go that far instead of just confronting the issue. But besides these regular ones there are the strange ones.

One day I got a request asking whether it would be possible for me to remove every negative news article ever made about one specific person from one country’s news sites. Yes all of them from all news papers. That almost got me interested into replying to the request, just to know what they are trying to hide.. But decided not to, just in case.. Then there are requests to “get my money back from a gambling site or some crypto deal”. Or locate who ever is behind what ever gamer tag or social media account and get their personal details..

No those aforementioned requests don’t come via some shady underground forums, but regular freelancer job exchanges. Which makes it seem to me that they actually don’t moderate their postings, even after reporting some illegal postings as illegal they were still up 3 days after the report.

After being bombarded with such requests for a while now, I wish people would actually learn what ethical hacker means and deal with their problems in a LEGAL way. Also I wish that freelancer sites would actually deal with the illegal offers on their sites them selves also.

As an ending to this rant, I have to cite the definition for ethical hacker I actually like and that feels right to me. The definition as it is written on techtarget :”An ethical hacker, also referred to as a white hat hacker, is an information security (infosec) expert who penetrates a computer system, network, application or other computing resource on behalf of its owners — and with their authorization.”