It was rather alarming to me when I heard that renowned online exploit archive site www.frsirt.com was no longer going to make public and freely downloadable the exploit code they hosted. The FrSIRT site is much more then simply an exploit code repository, however it is best known for the exploit code that it hosts.

The reason given by the site is that in order to comply with French law they were forced to no longer offer free and public access to the exploit code. You can still however have access to it should you be a subscriber to one of their services. It really is rather sad when one of the oldest democracies in the world comes to this.

Having such a quality central repository for exploit code was very handy, and of value to the computer security community. I for one went there all the time, and downloaded some of the code to play with in my lab. Sadly for me this will no longer be the case. That said I have no intentions of paying for a service so that I can still get it from them. There are still many other sites out there which host exploit code.

The only problem with some other sites is that often the code hosted is purposely obfuscated so that it does not compile. This is normally simple to fix, but for those out there without basic programming knowledge you are out of luck. Should you be in that situation then you may want to post on www.security-forums.com asking for help in getting it running. Forcing websites to remove exploit code is not a cure for anything, much like suing exploit researchers only makes things worst for computer security.