If you can answer ‘yes’ to all of the questions below, then by all means feel free to think of yourself as equal to or better than these ~el8 guys. Otherwise, please stop speaking down to people who are obviously much more technically skilled than your ignorance will ever allow you to be.
* Do you know how to program in C? Are you intimately familiar with ISO C89? C99? While other people in your neighbourhood were out partying, were you sitting at home in bed making an almost biblical study of the POSIX standards? What about those from The Open Group?

* Do you know how to write hash tables? Balanced trees? Do you know the art of algorithms? Do you know Knuth’s work like the back of your hand? Did you teach yourself everything about computers that one would otherwise only learn by paying thousands of dollars for in Computer Science tuition?

* Do you know how to juggle assembly code in your head for multiple architectures, such as MIPS, SPARC, x86? Do you understand the peculiarities of each architecture down to the nittiest, grittiest details? Can you optimize your own assembly routines? Can you take advantage of things such as Pentium instruction pairing or the delay slots in various RISC architectures? Do you understand the deal with the I-Cache on MIPS? Are you fluent in assembly language? Hell, do you even know what SPARC stands for? Quadrants in PA-RISC, make sense?

* Do you know how to write your own exploits? Do you know how to audit software with surgical precision for the most intricate bugs imaginable? Do you know how to take advantage of buffer overflows? Do you know how to exploit off-by-one errors on a little-endian machine? Do you know about integer overflows and signedness issues? Can you exploit format string vulnerabilities? Can you gain control of a process vulnerable to a heap overflow via a deep knowledge of the malloc implementation on the target host? Do you know how to bypass the “security” afforded by crap like Openwall, StackGuard, PaX? Or is your knowledge of these things limited to the papers that non-hackers publish? You probably think the people trying to help the security community with bullshit patches/fixes like this are hackers, when in fact no hacker would ever publish any such thing that aims to improve security.

* Have you studied the UNIX kernel with as much fervour as some would have for physical pursuits such as basketball or baseball? Do you know the data structures and organization in the kernels of various operating systems? Have you read books on UNIX internals cover to cover? Do you know how Linux works under the hood? Can you write your own kernel modules for both defense and offense? Ever written a kld on FreeBSD? Can you write a device driver for a peripheral that your OS doesn’t support? Can you find flaws in kernel src trees that allow you to compromise a machine given local access?

* What do you know about evading (N)IDS? Your knowledge isn’t limited to what Thomas Ptacek & Tim Newsham have said years ago, right? Surely you don’t rely on tools written by people like Dug Song who like to think of themselves as hackers, when in fact they are traitors to the underground, assuming they were ever a part of it to begin with.

* What do you know about defeating firewalls? What techniques have you innovated and pioneered on your own? What tools have you written that allow you to toy with firewalls? Hell, the fucktard security community is probably limited to lameass crap like Firewalk.

* What do you know about web security? Do you sit back and laugh at the “cross-site scripting” revolution governed by an idea that has been around well before the CSS/XSS sensation that literally blew the dumbass security community apart? Must’ve wasted a lot of brain cells with that gigantic stretch of the imagination. Do you laugh at all these “SQL injection” papers and how most of them overlook the blatantly obvious: they have you believe you have to fumble around with all kinds of convoluted queries to achieve something that can be done with minimal typing if only they’d read the fucking documentation for various DBMS. Their CGI experts like RFP and Zenomorph call certain script conditions non-exploitable, e.g. when you can’t get arguments supplied to a binary that you’ve managed to trick a Perl script into running — RFP mentions this in his Phrack article — yet any moron can easily figure out that you can use the POST method, make the script run /usr/bin/perl for instance, and have it run a script of your choice that is fed as stdin from the HTTP request’s POST data. Oh God, sorry for pushing the realm of web security forward with this INCREDIBLY COMPLEX revelation.

* Have you written your own tools that exploit protocol weaknesses? Have you written your own tools for routing protocol weaknesses, e.g. RIP, BGP? Have you written your own tools that play games with DNS? Have you written your own ARP cache poisoning / mitm tools? Your own tools for shit like icmp redirects and router advertisements? Can you write a tool that will exploit the TCP sequence number prediction + IP spoofing vulnerability of older days? Or can you only mock Mitnick for his 1994 attack, calling him a scriptkiddy? Or utter useless banter about ISNs and cookies that you digested from some textfile? Who are you kidding? Fuck, have you read all 3 volumes of the glorious TCP/IP Illustrated, or can you just mumble some useless crap about a 3-way handshake? Do you know Net/3 code? TCP algorithms? TCP extensions? Perhaps you’re some fucking security expert because you’ve memorized /etc/services — a walking fucking getservbyport, a la 70% of the Vuln-Dev subscription base.