As a former "black hat" (Score 5, Interesting)

Back when I was in high school, I was a script kiddie. I would DDoS my classmates to show how k-RaD I was. I had an extensive network of trin00 and BO2k zombies at my disposal. It was fun. For a while.

The best thing I learned from my experiences as a skript kiddie is that BUGTRAQ, BoS, and every other sysadmin-visited list was the last to hear about new security flaws. Sure, on occasion, @stake or the ISS X-Force would come up with something novel. But the majority of the time, I would see sploits circulated by my Russian friends on IRC weeks before anyone even mentioned the vulnerability on BUGTRAQ. Consider the BIND 8.2.2-P5 flaw: I had the ADM sploit for it weeks before an advisory was even issued.

Stopping full disclosure won't hurt the script kiddies. It will hurt the admins, who won't have enough information to patch their source base to fix the problem. (As a FreeBSD admin with a good grasp of C, patching a security hole takes on the order of minutes now.) But it will help this cartel to keep privileged information to themselves, so that hapless admins like myself will not have the information we need to defend ourselves. And it helps Microsoft, who can honestly claim that their systems are more secure than UNIX when the UNIX admins can't defend themselves more quickly than the M$ admins can anymore. It's just capitalism at work.

-CT