White hat hackers recruit from black hat ones, at least sometimes.

Answering a question here is not answering just the OP. Anyone having similar questions, or just browsing the forum, might be interested in the answers.

If the post itself doesn't contain any malicious code, #3 is definitely the correct way to go. By "educate", though, I don't mean giving them what they want; you can include all your ethical concerns into the reply, which might not interest the OP, but can help other script kiddies to consider changing their paths, and maybe change their hat from black to grey at least. You can always answer correctly but in a way that the answer can't be used without real understanding, i.e. show the solution to a slightly different situation that can still help some else who finds the page, but not the phishing scammer who just requires copy-n-paste ready source code.

Sometimes, repeating the same answer again and again (even to different people) leads to exhaustion. If that's your case, use #1.

I'd reserve #2 for posts directly containing or linking to malicious code.

map{substr$_->[0],$_->[1]||0,1}[\*||{},3],[[]],[ref qr-1,-,-1],[{}],[sub{}^*ARGV,3]

In reply to Re: Ethical considerations of responding to posts made by someone obviously up to no good by choroba
in thread Ethical considerations of responding to posts made by someone obviously up to no good by kikuchiyo

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