[1] It aims to provide users with a way to learn and practice basic and advanced "hacking" skills through a series of challenges in a safe and legal environment.

The most users online at the same time was 19,950 on February 5, 2018 at 2:46 a.m. CT.[2] HackThisSite involves a small, loose team of developers and moderators who maintain its website, IRC server, and related projects.

HackThisSite is known for its IRC network, where many users converse on a plethora of topics ranging from current events to technical issues with programming and Unix-based operating systems.

Before the split, the CriticalSecurity.net forums had most HTS discussion, specifically related to help with the challenges on the site as well as basic hacking questions.

Topics range from walkthroughs for the missions provided by HackThisSite, to articles regarding advanced techniques in a plethora of programming languages.

Users must successfully exploit one or more of the web sites pages to gain access to required data or to produce changes.

This section currently consists of twelve challenges charging the user to write a program which will perform a specified function within a certain number of seconds after activation.

Developers later decided to remove HTS easter eggs, as some allowed XSS and SQL exploits and many members submitted false bug reports as a result.

Despite this, several individual members have been arrested and convicted for illegal activity (most notably Jeremy Hammond, founder of HackThisSite).

Malicious users found and exploited the vulnerability which led to the takedown of several phpBB-based bulletin boards and websites.

[11][12][13] Slowness to patch the vulnerability by end-users led to an implementation of the exploit in the Perl/Santy worm (read full article) which defaced upwards of 40,000 websites and bulletin boards within a few hours of its release.

On March 17, 2005, Jeremy Hammond, the founder of HackThisSite, was arrested following an FBI investigation into an alleged hacking of conservative political activist group Protest Warrior.

Therefore, HackThisSite has had a long history of administrators, developers, and moderators turning darkside or severely impairing or completely taking down the site.

[16][17] In the last major attack to occur, several blackhat dissidents gained root-level access to the website and proceeded to "rm -rf" the entire site.