Maybe you do need to sometimes pull down someone else's pants to expose a problem. I think that's a moot point because nobody should really be able to disagree with that on pure logic. I think the important question is when someone feels they have no other choice, so they pull down the person's pants, should this be considered an immoral or criminal act? The guy can always say, "Look, I never intended to do any harm, I just wanted to get people's attention to fix this before someone who was intending to do harm came along." The problem is then how do you prove that they really were so benign? I think it'd be easy for a lot of blackhats to hide behind that if they ever got caught, or no? Even if there was complete immunity for people who immediately came out in the open and claimed responsibility for the sake of clearing the air, it'd still be easy for blackhats to hide their rationales in there, while they did something else more malicious (and then if that malicious thing was ever found, the blackhat can easily say, "Hey, I told you guys to fix it!! Now look what happened!! Wasn't me though!".

Maybe I missed something, but from looking through his posts, it seems that Egor felt the defaults in Rails were insecure (let's face it, they are), and then when he didn't get the immediate feedback from the rails team that he had hoped for, he decided to illustrate his point by hacking Github, which happens to be built on Rails. Nowhere did I read, on his own blog or within any of the rails issue tickets, that he actually tried reaching out to Github (i.e. contacting [email protected]) before exploiting the vulnerability.

Maybe he did try to contact Github first, but I didn't see anything mentioning that in any of the linked posts.

The immediate feedback was multiple issues closed as if they were not serious.