==

It is worth remembering that, although we do not cause damage 
to the systems we hack, what we do is still illegal. Our main 
aim is to satisfy our desire to hack and this co-exists with 
our aim of helping the system administrator secure his system 
against possible future attacks by the sort cyber-vandals who 
have managed to give hackers a bad name, by crashing systems,
violating people's privacy and generally causing trouble. The 
closest we come to this sort of thing is when the machine we 
hack is a web server, in which case, we will often leave our 
"calling card" - a small image of an ace of spades - at the 
bottom of the page, linked to a hidden page with information 
about AoHP.  One of our primary aims is to dispel the myth 
perpetuated by the media that all hackers are bad. Our name 
comes from an interview given by John Austen, then the 
Detective Inspector in charge of Scotland Yard's Computer 
Crime Unit, who expressed fears that "Gullible young hackers 
could be taken advantage of by agents of a hostile power." 
One of our aims is to influence gullible young hackers who 
might otherwise fall into the trap of hacking into some
serious site using some script they've downloaded from the
Net that exploits some bug that allows them root access,
boasting about it online or to their friends and getting
busted by the FBI and touted as a major threat to national 
security.

We feel that we define ethical hacking and we would like to 
think that a system administrator, when asked "If you were 
going to be hacked - didn't have a choice in the matter - 
who would you prefer to be hacked by?", would reply "The 
Agents of a Hostile Power." 

More and more, we are seeing hackers being captured and 
claiming that they did not intend to cause harm to the 
systems they had hacked and that they were only doing it 
for the challenge and so on. To these people, we would say 
this: If this is true, then adopt our policies of not 
altering the system by installing backdoors and of only 
using true hacking techniques - ie. avoiding password 
sniffers. Most importantly, alert the system administrator 
to the fact that his systems security is flawed, and let 
him know what steps he needs to take to fix this. Only 
then can you claim that your intentions were honourable or
ethical as opposed to malicious.

We know that what we do is illegal and, if any of us were 
to be captured, we would accept this fact, admit that we 
knew what we were doing was wrong, and face the music. For 
us, hacking is an intellectual challenge, not something to 
boast about to our peers (particularly as none of us are 
teenagers).Hacking isn't about impressing our friends. We 
don't want fame. We're ethical hackers and although it may 
sound corny, we have our honour and our code. 

That's all we need.

==