Hackers now have their own social network. GnuCitizen, a computer security consultancy, has set up a social network for hackers called House of Hackers on Ning.com

"House of Hackers is a social network for hackers," wrote Petko D. Petkov, founder of GnuCitizen, in a blog post on Tuesday. "From our perspective, a hacker is a person people express admiration for his/her work, skills, creative edge, cleverness, uniqueness, intelligence, etc. WE DO NOT PROMOTE CRIMINAL ACTIVITIES. The network is designed to enable its members to exchange ideas with each other, communicate, form groups, elite circles and tiger/red teams, conglomerate around projects and participate in a hacker recruitment market."

Petkov, who signs his posts PDP, expects that House of Hackers will help community members form project groups, plan events, find security-related jobs, and develop applications, plug-ins, and widgets for the network.

Having been built on the Ning platform, House of Hackers can be extended using the Google-backed Open Social API.

The House of Hackers main page advises organizations interested in working the network's hackers for penetration testing and related work to get in touch. "We can assure you that members of this network will provide far much better service than any other information security company out in the market today," the site boasts.

Since Tuesday, House of Hackers has grown from 348 members to about 850.

Among those joining the network, there's a mix of coders and social engineers. In a thread titled "What do you hack?", a person posting under the name Hydra acknowledges being a more proficient social engineer than coder. Hydra explains, "It is far easier to ask users for their credentials than to try and run an exploit."