STEVE: He was in an exclusive underground hacker forum, where he found some discussion among these hackers about buying ads on his site which were going to be deliberately infected with malware.

This is not... LEO: Get your code on a hacker forum.

IT security experts have long loved to troll through hacker forums to gather intelligence on emerging threats and even (as in the ill-fated case of HBGary Federal CEO Aaron Barr) try to profile the hackers themselves.

But Poulsen believes the FBI and secret service have had victories, smashing several hacker forums and destroying the sense of invulnerability their members had previously enjoyed.

The main flaw with the report is that it chose just one site to analyze: Hack Forums, a Web bulletin board that Imperva describes as "one of the largest-known hacker forums with roughly 250,000 members."

Now, he said I don't know what to do with it, so he went to a hacker forum and said, hey, anybody who wants access to Twitter and wants to change some passwords, go ahead, send me a note.

But in May, the source code for Zeus was "leaked" and published in several hacker forums.

We are feeding their egos and all the while, they are laughing at both you and I, whilst their sites get attention and they claim 'kudos' in hacker forums, as creativity grinds to an anxiety-ridden halt...

Security blogger Brian Krebs reports that he had seen a post last week on a Russian hacker forum by a member offering to sell root access MySQL.com for $3,000.

Imperva's highlighting of "social interaction in hacker forums" highly amusing, as if the concept of hackers as human beings, with wide-ranging opinions and problems, were alien to their understanding.