After reading all the way through this post:
http://eqemulator.net/forums/showthread.php?t=29125 I started thinking why can’t we as a community do something to try to stop or at the very least greatly hinder the few wannabe hackers who are disrupting servers and web forums. I would be willing to bet that it is the same peons doing the same old tricks repeatedly.
Lets face it hacking yahoo, hotmail and google email accounts is far from complicated and hacking most web forums or using a dos attack on a single ip address is not exactly rocket science either. Every time someone does any of the above mentioned they leave a footprint of some type whether it is ip address, mac address or some other form of id. We all have access to pretty much the same information as the peons causing the problems so why not use it against them.
Those who write the login scripts or have control of the main login server would obviously have the biggest potential impact on limiting and/or eliminating disruptions. The web forums or servers that are being attacked or have been attacked likely have information like ip addresses, account names and so forth that can be cross referenced with the main login server’s information and could ultimately be used against those stirring up trouble. I know that ip addresses and login information can be faked or stolen but the individuals causing the problems will at some point make a mistake that gives away who they really are. If enough complaints about a single ip address make their way to the ISP’s we can make them do something about it.
A permenant sticky post containing all the information that can be gathered on those causing problems would help keep the individual server administrators up to date on who to watch out for. This information would also need to be stored offline so in the event of another forum security breach the gathered information would still exist in a safe place. Also tracking the commonalities between the attacked servers and web forums could go a long way towards removing the annoyance of wannabe hackers. If these wannabe hackers had any real skill then they would not be targeting a web based video game.