 Six years have passed since Zone-H.org appeared first on the Internet. It's a long time, especially when talking about Internet based entities.
The reason why we decided to open up Zone-H was that we understood at that time the importance of having a mirror archive looking up for what was going on on the Internet and the other famous mirror archives were slowly dying (Safemode, Attrition, Alldas).
At that time, the best mirror archive was Alldas which had 12,500 mirrors archived in its database. Today, Zone-H has nearly 2,600,000 defacements archived in its own database.
Something to be proud of? Yes and no.
What are we proud of, and what aren't we proud of? The question is itchy...
By running such a large defacement archive we were able over the time to understand and anticipate trends in computer security. For example, we were the first in the world to forecast (and to demonstrate):
- the fact that the world of hacking was moving toward web application techniques
- the fact that the ancient Windows vs. Linux war was absolutely a waste of time and words
- the fact that politically motivated incidents would have become very common
- the raise of the Muslim hacking world.
- the disappearance of the Brazilians from the deface scene and their transformation in more dangerous cyber-criminals (spammers, scammers, carders)
- the use of the Internet for PsyOp scopes
- the fact that 3rd generations mobile phones worst threats were not coming from viruses, but at application level.
- the extensive cyber-espionnage activities of China
- the arrival of cyber-wars big enough to paralyze a country
- the anticipation of embedded spyware at hardware level
Bogus claims? Not really, just dig into the world's most famous security conferences' archives or in our own news archive and you always will find Zone-H presenting a topic which might be hot today, but it was unknown at the time we talked about it first.
With so many advantages coming from the possession of an archive such ours, that allows in a direct or in a indirect way to somewhat forecast the future happenings, what's on the negative side?
The most common critic moved to us from Zone-H haters is "Zone-H is at the base of the problem. No more Zone-H, no more defacements".
Our usual answer to this claim is that Zone-H is not the first mirror archive website, others appeared before it, others will be after it. And the first defacement mirror website, appeared AFTER defacements became very popular.
But sure, a lot of defacers are using Zone-H archive capability just to satisfy their ego-driven needs, using Zone-H as a stage for their own lack of personality or social skills.
And this is why we would like to hear from YOU whether Zone-H should continue to mirror defacements or not. We opened a poll on the left bar on our homepage. This poll will keep going on for a period of time long enough to give us the correct representation of your idea. But what we actually want from you is that you will add a comment to this news in which you will caste your vote and will describe WHY we should or we should not keep mirroring defacements.
Only comments with the explanation will be considered as valid therefore published. At the end, after we evaluated a big enough number of comments/casted polls, we'll post another article with our own considerations and final decisions.
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