Hi

We would really appreciate if you could spread the news of a study we, as academic faculties, are currently engaged into. The image of hackers has been contradicting to the general public and a lot of misunderstandings have been implanted to them. We would like to reveal the truth to the general public on the behaviour of the real hackers. The study is conducted on an world-wide scale and we are expecting a good sample of hacers to participate so that the real findings can be extracted. The findings will be published in the mainstream journals to clarify the facts of hacker's behavior. Your participation will not only assist in this meaningful proceed but also to secure an incentive of US$10 as a token of appreciation. The study will only take less than 15 minutes of your time. Please proceed to the following website which houses the questionnaire. Once you got into the website, your will also need the access code as provided below.

website address: http://www.academia-research.com

access code: select*group

Thanks a lot.

The researchers

This all seems very suspicious to me. The two researchers have hotmail addresses, and it would make far more sense if the domain was somewhere in the .edu space.

The title of the page is "Siew Chan's Questionaire", which is not only mispelt but also rather un-academicish.

I also wonder where all these lots of $10 are going to come from.

well, the whois output says the registrant is "University of Massachusetts" (no idea how reliable that is...) and Mr. Siew seems to have a @umb.edu email address.

I went over it. It plainly ignores that many hackers are still going to school. Especialy the last set of questions.
I have my doubts about this.

Can someone please tell me what this is supposed to accomplish?

It's an offensive to reduce hacking. First if hackers spend 5 minutes on filling out the questionnaire, then spend 5 minutes less on hacking. Next the ones who disclose their adress are removed from the group (by FBI). Basically it's natural selection.

Survival of the most intelligent eh, (u)natural selection in the 21st century...

Upon inspection of the survey I do not believe it corresponds to me or many other people here for that matter, but I will take your ten dollars LOL.

Just the clear up the money issue, my university (and I'm sure almost all others do) will fund dissertations and research. I get loads of junk mail at my uni for similar things, like They pay you 5/10 US to eat pizza and watch TV for 1 hour (some medicial experiment I think for weight gaining or for TV radiation or something)

and the hotmail addresses are probably used to avoid people sending spam.

Still, they targeted the wrong people, I don't know if any of us here would qualify as a "hacker" by their definition

unless he means the programmers or whatever, theres no definition and he asks to spread the news...

Basically, they are giving away money. Their loss.

It sounds quite confusing, but it is possible that it's a scam to catch hackers. I suppose it could be for research too, until I read the replies to the original message, I was sure it was, but I can be quite gullible!

The feds probably get a nice printout of their data.
Next weeks headline: 250K hackers arrested. All found quilty because of online confesion.

well he's using the "other" definition though.