The Israeli hacking community

A lot of people are asking me lately what I think about the Israeli hacking community...
Well, here's what I have to say about it:

First of all, let's take a look, for the past 9 years these are the groups \ eZines \ Sites that emerge:
IHPG - Israeli Hack Phreak Group, Chaos-IL, IHU - Israel Hackers Unite, IIU - Israeli Internet Underground, m0sad, IOC - Israeli Outlawz Community, Un(e)scapable, IHP - Israeli Hackers Palace, Gehenom, Dark-Fire, Faithless, Emix, HaSatan, 2600-il, PRUG - Project UnderGround, Matrix zine, IHFB - Israeli Hackers Fight Back, Hacker Zone, IEF - Israeli Elite Fightes, G-Hacker, IHC - Israeli Hacking Crew, BlueTiger Hacking Team, FireCrackers Hacking Team, 8200.org, Cyber Caus, Isra-Hell, IHA - Israeli Hacking Alliance, BinaryVision, IKP - Israeli Knowledge Preservers, Sec.Org.il and so on... I can't remember all of them.

What have survived? NONE!
0K, there is some sites that are still alive (weak pulse but alive...):
hacker.co.il by Matan Gillon
UWP - UnderWarrior Project by Nir Adar
And some new ones (they'll be great!):
Recognize-Security by d0rmouse, Hypathia and myself.
Tera-Byte by JonJon & HLL
SED Security team owned by SkOd
And Faithless also returned (no current URL..) - Faithless - Next Generation by P[O]D

But fuck it.. why there isn't a stable group\eZine\Site in Israel?!
I mean, none survived for more then two years :-Israel got a million people on-line, 85% of the have broadband.
An Israeli surfer spends 4 times more hours on the net in compare to the American surfer.
So what's wrong with the Israelis?

I'll try to answer that question by analyzing the typical Israeli hacker (or wanna-be) figure:
Note: The Israeli hacking community is more or less divided to two parts, people before the army and people after it. I'll refer to the younger d00ds.

10-12 y.o - discovering cyberspace and\or programming.
13-15 y.o - discovering hacking\phreaking\cracking.
16-18 y.o - becoming a hacker.
and then..... B00M!!! The army recruits them :-(
Of course there is a lot of exceptional but that's basically it.
Mostly, the IDF wont even use the knowledge of the young recruit hackers, because most of them have a "97-82 profile" (high physical profile - fighter compatible), and they'll become fighters.
Most of them won't return to computers hacking, very few stay in the business.
3 years at the IDF... you forget a lot... :-Another thing that's fucking up the Israeli hacking scene is the nature of Israelis.
Israelis want everything 'right here! right now!', young users that come in 'the scene' doesn't realize they actually have to learn, sit on their asses and read a lot of stuff before they can hack a box.
They go like "what the fuck?! read all this shit to be a hacker? no way! I wanna hack my friends ICQ\forum\blog! I wanna hack their boxes, I don't care if I won't learn anything with NetBus\Sub7... I want to hack it NOW!".
Fucking n00b heads! they're going the express way to script-kiddism\FXP-sluts. I hate the 'FXP scene', they're so lame I won't even "compliment" them by calling them 'warez d00dz'...

Because of that most of the very few hackers that "survive" this and the army brain-killing-time, prefer to work alone and you barely hear from them.

That's the three MAIN reasons why the Israeli hacking community\scene is so unstable and small.
So what should we do?

I talked with A LOT of people about it...
A lot of them say (pretty interesting thing by the way..) that the seniors should let the scene die and reborn with a younger generation.
Some seniors claims that every 2-3 years there's a rebirth to the Israeli hacking scene, and now it is time for us to give the youngsters space to evolve it.

I don't think so. I think we should help evolving the scene. help newbies to learn new stuff and direct them the right way..
Only by doing that we'll have a great community and a lot of promising newbies that one day, become great hackers.


I'll love to hear what YOU have to say about it, please post a comment or send me an e-mail.