I haven't updated for a while, and it's clearly not for lack of newsworthy hacking incidents. Mostly I've just been busy - but I've also been considering the future of the Gibson Index project as a whole.

I started it because I saw a lot of injustice and overzealous persecution going around. However, it soon became a regurgitation of what news outlets were saying, peppered with a few links to extra information. The attack ratings grew increasingly meaningless, when I had hoped they would be compelling and informative.

Rating an attack doesn't help combat injustice. It doesn't educate people about how to protect themselves from cybercrime. It certainly doesn't dampen zealotry.

It just takes time and saps energy.

I would like the Gibson Index to be about inspiring discussion, fostering education, and combatting injustices related to misunderstood hacking incidents.

But I don't know what I need to do to make that happen.

I'm open to the idea of completely open sourcing it on Github, perhaps moving away from the blogging/rating concepts entirely. Maybe it could be reorganized into a pure collaborative index of resources, sort of the way that "PHP The Right Way" seeks to correct atrocious PHP through education.

Another possibility would be having guest bloggers. This would allow for more in-depth discussion and explorations of what hacking really is like, similar to that recent story about a Yahoo server being hacked.

If you have any thoughts on the subject, or would be willing to contribute in some way to a GitHub-backed version of Gibson Index, please let me know in the comments or via twitter.

Related Links

• "Yahoo SQL Injection to Remote Code Exection to Root Privilege."
• "Inside Shellshock: How hackers are using it to exploit systems"
• "Another Card System Hack at Supervalu, Albertsons"
• "Home Depot Was Hacked by Previously Unseen 'Mozart' Malware" (Mozart's Ghost!)
• "PHP The Right Way"