New York Times:

A new website, called Hacker’s List, seeks to match hackers with people looking to gain access to email accounts, take down unflattering photos from a website or gain access to a company’s database. In less than three months of operation, over 500 hacking jobs have been put out to bid on the site, with hackers vying for the right to do the dirty work.

This is tricky, both ethically and from a legal standpoint. Like torrent sites that offer perfectly legal technology that enable you to do something that crosses legal boundaries, Hacker’s List itself is just a classified ads web site. What you do with it is your business.

A few more bits and pieces. Here’s how they make money:

It is done anonymously, with the website’s operator collecting a fee on each completed assignment. The site offers to hold a customer’s payment in escrow until the task is completed.

And here are a few examples:

A man in Sweden says he will pay up to $2,000 to anyone who can break into his landlord’s website. A woman in California says she will pay $500 for someone to hack into her boyfriend’s Facebook and Gmail accounts to see if he is cheating on her.

And:

a bidder who claimed to be living in Australia would be willing to pay up to $2,000 to get a list of clients from a competitor’s database, according to a recent post by the bidder.

“I want the client lists from a competitors database. I want to know who their customers are, and how much they are charging them,” the bidder wrote.

Others posting job offers on the website were looking for hackers to scrub the Internet of embarrassing photos and stories, retrieve a lost password or change a school grade.