s0lar does seem dedicated to the cause, however. "Up until now, when you met another hacker on an IRC or forum, there was no way to indicate if that hacker had any skills what so ever [sic], RankMyHack.com was built to give a clear indication of a hackers [sic] general abilities," s0lar writes on the site.
"It also serves the purpose of tracking a hackers [sic] hacking acheivements [sic] under their current alias allowing for other hackers to quickly establish the calibre of hacker they are talking to."
The English/poor spelling of 'calibre,' rather than the American 'caliber,' may indicate a British citizen is behind the site.
Hacker success?
Despite being locked out of participation, we were able to access the leaderboard. This showed, of over 700 members, a hacker going by the name Mudkip was top. That particular hacker was purportedly behind a hit on the Huffington Post at the start of August, earning them a whopping 1,666,666 points.
In second was Rafael, whose most significant hit was apparently on a site called stackoverflow.com a forum for programmers.
Zepvn is currently ranked third, claiming hacks on significant companies including Mozilla and Amazon Web Services.
The list of top hacks also claimed Yahoo and Google were hit, so clearly the site has inspired hackers going for the jugulars of huge corporations all in the name of competition. Scary stuff.
And that was pretty much all we could find. It's a small site right now, although given it's in its incipient stages, don't be surprised if RankMyHack.com grows to become something better organised and more popular.
What does our little trip to RankMyHack.com show us? That hacking company websites is worryingly still considered a sport by many. Put simply, IT managers should still be worried about hobby hackers, not just money-hungry cyber criminals.
You also have to wonder whether such sites provide law enforcement with a wealth of information too. Of course, this only bodes well for businesses as they look to defend themselves from hackers with a competitive edge.
