I'm not talking about real hacking.

I found a serious miss in the programming of one Bulgarian website. You can enter empty comments with alt+0160 (such an old trick). And by not allowing the site to save cookies you can dislike the article unlimited times (just as old).

I left some submitting scripts work for around 2 mins (actually forgot them). And that made around 100 dislikes and 25 empty comments.

I didn't intend to spam that much, but it happened.

Is it a stupid idea to mail the owner of the website and tell them I can offer help in return of an article about website security with a link to my website? Do you have suggestions on what to write in the mail if you think it's a good idea? I already have the mail ready, but more ideas are never bad.

Can I be subject of legal action if I do that? Until I send the email, it will all go as if nothing ever happened. And I don't feel like screwing myself up really, haha. Neither do I feel like making a new email so I can be more anonymous - I prefer to either stand up to my name, or just don't do anything at all.

They can very easily decrease the dislikes, and delete the empty comments.. I haven't done anything more on the website. And I don't intend to. Which I also mention in the email. And I start the email with an apology for the inconvenience. I can't post it though, because you won't understand a thing - it's in Bulgarian.

And yeah, it's probably kiddish to do such stuff, but I like testing stuff when I go on various websites. I don't really like to hack or spam - that's just lame, I just like to find vulnerabilities, because that helps me in the future - when I have to program something myself.

Well, can't predict what the owner of the site thinks about this but if you would contact me and tell me a site of mine has this problem I'd be happy to hear this to solve it for the future as it's almost inevitable that someone will actually take disadvantage of this.

Besides, he can't sue you because he has a poorly made website and you did not do any actual harm.

Just my 2c.

As long as you caused no damage, as long as you did not go outside of the permission level for your account, then you should be fine. Email him, let him know there is a problem. Some thing along the lines of "Hey, I noticed there was a problem with your site, it let me do this, and I don't think that's what you intended."

I agree with what the guys said. Unless you encounter a moron extraordinaire, the owner of the site should be glad you bothered to inform him/her about the problem. After all, it's just a couple of comments and votes, I doubt anybody could get mad over those...

Thanks guys! Just rewrote the entire mail, because I knew what I wanted to say this time. Really - thank you all.

I guess you'll be just as curious as I am now about the reply, so I'll make sure to post here again when/if I get one. I just sent the email to them. ^^