While working at SI a portion of our time gets to be spent on research projects. I chose to use some of this time to take my capstone project from college (infsek.tk) and open source it as Want2Hack.com. In this process Security Innovation also allowed me to set up an instance of the site to be hosted by them as a training ground for aspiring Security Professionals to practice their skills in a safe environment, and experienced security researchers to demonstrate their latest findings.
Want2Hack is a crowd sourced hacking challenge site. Where every individual with an idea for a challenge can create it and host it on want2hack.com. This challenge can then be hacked and completed by others for points. These points are rewarded to both the developers of challenges, and the attackers of challenges, where the current point value is based on how many people have completed the challenge in relation to how many have attempted it, with some consideration as to how people rated the challenge's difficulty. The developer also only receives points once the first person completes the challenge. This encourages people to make challenges that are possible, but also difficult.
The site is still a bit sparse in terms of the challenges to complete but there is enough to have some fun and learn a bit while you are at it. Over the next couple of months I hope to add to the challenges in my free time. In order for the site to succeed there needs to be enough content with varying degrees of difficulty so that before a user finishes it all they feel comfortable enough to start creating content. This critical mass point is what I am trying to attain, and once I do I hope the site can carry itself with a constantly evolving amount of content.
