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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Technology
Charles Arthur

You decide: should you hack that hateful party's website?

graffiti in North London 2004

A friend who's quite into hacking around with stuff says that he's found a flaw in the website of a political party whose views you both detest. (Its leader might have appeared on a high-profile television programme recently, for example.)

The flaw, your friend explains, would let you hack into the site and change everything around. Then you, with your expertise, could change the front page, leave scripts that would capture login details, pretty much anything. Maybe there would even be some useful databases hanging around there.

You're interested - but the Computer Misuse Act doesn't have a public interest defence, and you're unsure whether your friend has the hacking chops to do this undetected. Then again, that leering face on the website is soooo annoying..

What do you do?

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